Iran confessed to shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet because it couldn’t keep lying about it, a foreign diplomat said. In an abrupt reversal for a regime at first intent on evading responsibility for the tragedy, Tehran admitted early Saturday that its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accidentally shot down the jet.
“They understood that they can’t cover up anymore,” a Central European diplomat told the Washington Examiner.
Iranian officials initially blamed the crash on a mechanical error, while Western intelligence officials said that a surface-to-air missile shot down the plane. When local authorities bulldozed the crash site this week, the tragedy seemed likely to follow the template Russia set after Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Iran abandoned the subterfuge, though, as videos of the incident circulated online.
“They are not as good at disinformation as Russians are,” the Central European diplomat said.
“Russians are still denying MH17, and right after MH17, Kremlin came up with dozens of different scenarios, while Iranians had only one — plane tried to turn back, which indicates technical error.”
Iran admitted on Saturday that an IRGC anti-aircraft unit shot down the airplane hours after the regime launched ballistic missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq.
The public confession by Tehran is a rare retreat by an authoritarian regime in the face of a Western intelligence consensus. “The evidence was mounting up, and Iranians understood that they either admit or start blunt lies and denial,” the Central European diplomat said.
The accident occurred while the Iranian military was on high alert and while Tehran neglected to ground civilian flights that night, a Western intelligence official told the Washington Examiner.
The Iranian officer operating the anti-aircraft missiles fired upon the plane after a glitch in communications prevented him from consulting with commanders, according to the IRGC. “Either the jamming system was busy or the network was busy, it couldn’t communicate in any way,” Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a commander of the aerospace division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said on state-run media. “In this situation, he had five seconds to make a decision. Unfortunately, he made the bad decision and shot the missile and hit the plane.”
The split-second decision resulted in 176 civilian deaths, including more than 80 Iranians and dozens of Canadians. “The evidence indicates that the place was shot down by an Iranian surface to air missile,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Thursday.
