After Flight 752: what did Iran's admission change?
A look back at the days after Iran acknowledged it had shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, and at the protests that followed.
What did Iran's admission mean for the people who had lost relatives on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752? On 13 January 2020, that question was still open, two days after Tehran acknowledged what had happened.
The flight was a scheduled service from Tehran to Kyiv. As later background describes it, the Boeing 737-800 was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shortly after takeoff on 8 January 2020, killing all 176 people on board.
The admission of 11 January
On 11 January 2020, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps admitted that it had mistakenly shot down the aircraft as it took off from Tehran. The same day, Iran's president officially acknowledged that the country's armed forces had mistakenly downed the plane with a missile near the capital.
From vigils to protests
The admission did not end the matter in Iran. Vigils held for the victims turned into protests on 11 January. According to videos posted on Twitter, hundreds of protesters in Tehran called for the resignation of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The diplomatic fallout also reached London that day. The British ambassador to Iran, Robert Macaire, was arrested after attending a vigil and, according to the BBC, getting his hair cut. Tasnim News Agency reported that he was held on suspicion of organising, provoking and directing radical actions. The UK Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, said the arrest was a flagrant violation of international law. Macaire was released more than an hour later.
A retrospective view
Seen from 13 January 2020, the sequence was short and fast: a downed airliner, an official admission by the Guard Corps and the president, and street demonstrations that began as mourning. For Ukraine, whose national carrier operated the flight and whose capital was its destination, the admission settled the cause of the crash. It did not answer the wider questions the protests raised in Tehran.
