How Iran's admission over Flight 752 unfolded by 12 January 2020
A look back at the position of events on 12 January 2020, a day after Iran acknowledged that its armed forces had downed the Ukrainian airliner.
What did the world know about the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on 12 January 2020? By then, the central question of cause had been answered by Tehran itself.
On 11 January 2020, Iran's president officially acknowledged that the country's armed forces had mistakenly shot down the Boeing 737 of Ukraine International Airlines with a missile near Tehran. The admission came a day after Iranian authorities had rejected the same theory.
On 10 January 2020, Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, suggested that the aircraft had been brought down by an Iranian missile. Iranian authorities dismissed this. The head of Iran's civil aviation authority said he was certain the plane had not been hit by a missile and continued to attribute the crash to mechanical failure.
The aircraft had been operating a scheduled flight from Tehran to Kyiv. As later described, it was shot down shortly after takeoff on 8 January 2020 by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and all 176 people on board were killed.
The sequence meant that within three days Iran moved from an assertion of technical failure to an official acknowledgement that its own military had fired on the passenger plane.
