Speaking to ILNA, Hamid Reza Seyyedi said that the company is not in the position to decide the rise in the number and model of the planes, noting that despite it, the program for developing the fleet and developing airport infrastructures are in good accordance and interaction.

He added that the state and private sectors demand the arrival of planes to increase the fleet but this industry in the country has been under sanctions for 40 years and the knowledge of building plane is in the monopoly of the Western states and they do not this knowledge to be used by other states.

Seyyedi noted that sales of plane to Iran is forbidden due to the U.S. sanctions, adding that the country has tried to revive this industry with the help of its brace scientists and engineers and the private and state sectors have done their best to meet the demands of the country from anywhere they could get the planes.

On the price of ticket he said that the company is not in charge and this is the airliners which decide the ticket prices. He reiterated that the price is determined because of the demand-and-supply and currently there is no balance between the supply and demand and it has led to the chaos in the price of tickets. He reiterated that in the current condition, the middlemen are the winners of such a situation and both airliner and customer are losers.

Seyyedi noted that the number of flights during the Nowruz (New Year) holidays faced 20% rise, adding that the company is trying to improve the quality of air and airport services. He reiterated that this year the delays of flights has reduces, admitting that sometimes the delays are inevitable and nobody can do anything.

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“Every aviation novice knows that the views of Canada as a consultant to Ukraine have been received and taken into account, and therefore, Canada is judicially unqualified to make unilateral and arbitrary reports or comments on air accident reports within the jurisdiction of another country,” Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Mohsen Baharvand said on Friday.

Making a reference to Canada’s latest report on the incident, Baharvand said even the Canadians have admitted that the downing of the plane by Iran’s military was not intentional.

Canada admitted in a report published on Wednesday that it had found “no evidence” after eight months of investigation that the incident was “premeditated”.

“While the Forensic Team found no evidence that the downing of Flight PS752 was premeditated, this in no way absolves Iran of its responsibility for the death of 176 innocent people,” CBC News reported, citing an unclassified report on the circumstances and causes of the aircraft’s destruction.

The report came a month after a Canadian court ruled that the incident was deliberate and claimed it was an “act of terrorism.”

On January 8, 2020, the Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, en route to Kiev while carrying mostly Iranians, crashed minutes after takeoff near the Iranian capital, killing all of the 176 passengers on board.

Despite admitting that the incident was not intentional, the Canadian government’s report went on to put the blame on Iranian civil and military authorities for causing “a dangerous situation” that led to the downing of the plane.

However, the report failed to mention the United States’ assassination of Iran’s top anti-terror General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3, 2020, which in turn set in train a series of events that led to the downing of the plane.

Amid soaring tensions after the ill-advised Soleimani assassination, the Islamic Republic retaliated by firing missiles at an American base in Iraq on January 8, 2020.
Tehran has said the Ukrainian plane was downed accidentally by the operator of a surface-to-air-missile system soon after Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes, which put the country’s military on the highest state of defensive alert as well as preparedness for a full-fledged war with the U.S.

Baharvand said part of the report which criticized Iran’s final report on the incident is “technically baseless” and therefore “unacceptable” because Iran had sent the draft for comment to other countries, whose responses were included in the final report.

“Everyone should know that experts from the United States, Britain, and France, with whom we may have political differences, have kept their opinions in a professional manner and have commented positively on and appreciated the professional conduct of our country’s accident investigation team,” he said.

He pointed out that the incident was neither the first nor will it be the last plane crash in the world.

The senior diplomat also maintained that the global civilian aviation industry would be harmed if such acts of politicization by the Canadian government becomes the norm in the world.

“Imagine that in any aviation incident, other countries ignore regulations and protocols of investigating the incident and take measures outside the available frameworks to try to put unilateral political pressure on the country where the incident occurred,” Baharvand regretted.

“According to the Chicago Convention, if they had new information, they should have provided it to the Iranian investigation team instead of fomenting useless media and political commotion,” he added.

Iran has repeatedly denounced politicizing the case by certain countries, including Canada and Ukraine.

Back in March, Tehran published the final results of its investigation into the causes of the incident. In the report, Iran’s civil aviation agency again concluded that human error was behind the incident.

“Following a tactical relocation, the relevant ADU (air defense unit) failed to adjust the system direction due to human error, causing the operator to observe the target flying west from IKA (airport) as a target approaching Tehran from the southwest at a relatively low altitude,” Iran’s report said.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Baharvand pointed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s threat to take Iran to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, saying such remarks are “immature” and are based on pressures from Canadian politicians.

“They tried to exploit the incident to create a status for themselves in the eyes of the public, but of course, they couldn’t,” he said.
The diplomat said Iran has the evidence and is capable of defending itself in any court of justice.

“Of course, if Canada or any other country interacts with Iran within the framework of law and mutual respect, as is customary in diplomatic and international relations, they will receive Iran’s constructive response,” he added.

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Keyvan Khosravi, the spokesman for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), made the remarks in a Monday interview with Press TV, saying that the plane’s black boxes were one of the main sources of information used to compile the final report of an investigation over accidental shooting down of the Ukrainian plane by Iranian air defense forces in January 2020.

Asked about recent remarks by an informed Iranian official, who said Ukraine is trying to attribute the incident to problems with the Russian Tor-M1 missile system, Khosravi declined to answer that question, but said, “Unfortunately, Ukrainian officials are trying to ascribe false allegations to Iranian officials in order to politicize this case, and their recent allegations in this regard are by no means constructive and acceptable.”

The official mentioned Iran’s all-out cooperation with Ukraine to clarify various aspects of this incident, saying, “Since the inception of this bitter incident, we have accepted all demands put forth by Ukrainian government, which at times went beyond what was necessary under usual circumstances, so that, there would remain no dark corner in the efforts made to shed light on the truth in this incident.”

“Sending the plane’s black boxes to France to decode their contents is the most important reason that proves Iran’s transparency and honesty in its effort to bring to light all details about this incident,” Khosravi said.

Khosravi described efforts made to take political advantage “of a bitter incident, which is related to sentiments of scores of bereft families” as “regrettable and inhuman,” adding, “Various independent expert groups have delved into all the existing hypotheses about targeting of the Ukrainian plane.”

All those groups, the Iranian official said, “have asserted categorically and based on technical and expert evidence that this incident has been unintentional and a result of human error.”

“So far, no foreign authority has offered any other technical reason to dismiss or even undermine Iran’s expert report [on this incident] and [some parties] are merely trying to mount political pressure on Iran by creating [an adverse] media atmosphere and provoking sentiments of the families of this incident’s martyrs,” Iran’s security official said.

Khosravi concluded by saying that judicial measures are underway in hearing of culprits of this bitter incident and their punishment will be soon meted out through the competent court.

On January 8, 2020, the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, en route to Kiev and carrying mostly Iranians, crashed minutes after takeoff near the Iranian capital, killing all the 176 on board.

The plane was shot down by Iran’s air defenses, which mistook the aircraft for a military target amid tensions between Tehran and Washington following the US assassination of top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq days earlier.

On Saturday, An informed official close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said Ukraine has been trying to politicize the January 2020 accidental downing of its passenger plane in an attempt to mount pressure on Russia amid tensions between the two neighbors.

The official, whose name was not released, told Nour News on Sunday that Ukrainian officials had offered that Iran announce a technical glitch in its Russian-made Tor-M1 anti-aircraft defense system as the cause of the tragedy.

On Friday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh dismissed a claim by Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, that the crash was “intentional and conscious attack.”

Danilov had told Canadian daily The Globe and Mail earlier in the day that “when they claim it was accidental…I don’t buy that.” He described the incident as “intentional” and a “conscious attack.”

In response, Khatibzadeh said “despite all the explanations as well as technical and expert reports [on the incident], Ukrainian officials continue making vague, political remarks,” expressing regret that “they present their imaginary and commissioned theories through media.”

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Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), headed the Ukrainian delegation for discussing the situation around passenger plane downed a month ago with Iran’s Shamkhani.

The Ukrainian passenger plane, with 176 people aboard, was mistaken for an invading missile. The tragic incident happened a few hours after Iran fired missiles at a U.S. air base in Iraq in retaliation for the January 3 assassination of General Qassem Soleimani. Following the retaliation attack, the Iranian military had been put on high alert.

The victims of the crash included 82 Iranians, 63 Iranian-Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three Germans, and three British nationals.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) on Saturday and discussed the incident.

IRNA reported on Saturday that the top officials exchanged views on cooperation in investigating the incident.

On Friday, Zarif also met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne.

According to the website of Canada’s Foreign Ministry, the two agreed to remain in close touch over the issue of the plane crash.

“The two also discussed the download and analysis of PS752’s black boxes. Minister Champagne reiterated that the preferred option of the International Coordination and Response Group is for Iran to make use of the facilities offered by France, which possesses the technical capacity to perform this work. Minister Champagne also stressed the importance of a fair and equitable compensation settlement for the families of the victims, based on international standards,” the website reported.

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