How Iran's admission over Flight 752 reshaped the picture
A look back at the days before 13 January 2020, when denials gave way to acknowledgement of a missile strike on a Kyiv-bound airliner.
What did the world know about the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 by 13 January 2020, and how quickly had the official account changed? In the space of three days, Iran moved from rejecting the idea of a missile strike to acknowledging it.
The flight was a scheduled service from Tehran to Kyiv, operated by Ukraine International Airlines. On 8 January 2020, the Boeing 737-800 was shot down shortly after takeoff by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing all 176 people on board.
From denial to admission
On 9 January, Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said at a news conference that it was too early to draw definitive conclusions that the downing was an act of war. He also condemned Iran's attack on U.S. bases in Iraq.
On 10 January, after Trudeau suggested the plane had been brought down by an Iranian missile, Iranian authorities rejected that theory. Iran's civil aviation chief said he was certain the aircraft had not been hit by a missile and continued to attribute the crash to mechanical failure.
The position reversed on 11 January. Iran's President officially acknowledged that the country's armed forces had mistakenly shot down the Ukrainian airliner with a missile near Tehran.
What the sequence shows
The order of events matters for anyone assessing the episode. A foreign government's public suggestion of a missile strike was followed within a day by a categorical denial from Iran's aviation authority, and within two days by an acknowledgement at the highest level. The mechanical-failure explanation did not survive beyond 10 January.
The acknowledgement also established that the loss was the result of an error by Iran's armed forces, not a technical fault. For Ukraine, whose national carrier operated the flight and whose capital was its destination, that settled the basic question of what had happened to the aircraft. By 13 January 2020 the matter had moved from the cause of the crash to the consequences of an admitted shooting down.
