generalspeaking

There Is No Accountability from Iran

"The bodies of these innocent people were looted and improperly and indifferently interfered with, causing indignity to the remains of the murdered."
"Most of the cellphones, rings, passports, they were looted. Money, the wallets, everything."
"And they have photos of Iranian officials searching the bags and the luggage to find something."
"We don't know what they were doing."
Hamed Esmaeilion, dentist, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Iran's downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps firing two missiles at the Boeing 737, causing it to crash with all 176 passengers and crew aboard killed, has never been resolved. Six months have gone, yet Tehran, which had agreed to hand over the recovered black boxes to France, which has the required technology to extract their data for scrutiny and analysis to ascertain details of what had occurred, has not taken place.

The Islamic Republic of Iran would prefer the international community to view the dead passengers as Iranian citizens, though it cannot claim the Ukrainian crew as such. As Iranian citizens, the Republic could claim those deaths are an internal matter, nothing whatever to do with any outside agency or national interests. On the other hand, Canada, which no longer has any diplomatic relations with Iran, is mourning the loss of 55 Canadian citizens, as well as 30 permanent residents.

Also among the 138 passengers on that doomed flight were Iranian students returning to Canada to resume their studies at Canadian universities. The flight had left Tehran airport with the intention of stopping over at Kyiv, a normal route to Canada and then on to Canada with its Canada-bound passengers returning after the Christmas break. Iranian air-defence forces' targeting of the civilian passenger plane ensured that journey would never be completed.

Mr. Esmaeilion mourns the untimely deaths of his wife Parisa Eghbalian, and their daughter, Reera, 9, who had visited Iran to briefly reunite with family. He along with others had brought their dead back to Canada, after pleading with officials in Iran to allow their flight back to their families for burial in Canada. He was eventually forced to sign a form that his wife and daughter were Iranian citizens. "They act like my wife and my daughter  ... are their property", he said.


Javad Soleimani of Montreal had gone to Tehran to bury his wife, Elnaz Nabiyl, when he was called into a security service office after authorities heard he had criticized the Iranian government. He had seen inscriptions on the coffins of those killed in the crash: "They murdered our loved ones and then said [wrote on the caskets] "Congratulations on your martyrdom".

Iranian officials went out of their way to harass the family members of those killed in the  air crash. To insist that they must grieve privately, that they must permit government minders to attend any memorial events, and that the mourners must praise the leaders of Tehran. Esmaeilion and Soleimani belong to a group in Canada calling themselves the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, focused on winning support for families affected by the crash.

They aspire to ensure that abroad, international investigation of the shooting down of the passenger plane comes to pass to reflect the wishes of the relatives of over a hundred victims. And they plan to ask Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne to have Canada press Iran to reveal what had occurred that led to the deaths of their loved ones on January 8, as they were set to return to Canada and simply failed to arrive.

Mr. Esmaeilion insists there must be an accounting, where the Iranian government discloses in detail how it could be that a commercial airliner would be shot down by an arm of the Iranian government with the release of communications related to the event. "Was it intentional or not? If it was a human error, just prove it", he insists.