President of Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) Yevhen Dykhne has said that he had no doubt about the innocence of the company and the crew in a Ukrainian plane crash in Iran on January 8.
He wrote this on his Facebook page.
“We had no doubt for a second that our crew and our plane could not have caused this terrible, horrific plane crash. I thank everyone who thought and analyzed, who shared and shares this with us. It’s very important to us. They were our best guys. The best ones. We are mourning, and the whole world without exaggeration is mourning with us. 167 lost lives. Nine of our crew members,” Dykhne wrote.
On January 11, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani apologized for the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane by the Iranian military, expressing his condolences to the families of the dead. He called the plane crash a disastrous mistake.
Rouhani wrote on his Twitter account that “Armed Forces’ internal investigation has concluded that regrettably missiles fired due to human error caused the horrific crash of the Ukrainian plane & death of 176 innocent people.” He also stressed that investigations continued to identify and prosecute “this great tragedy and unforgivable mistake.”
A Ukraine International Airlines plane (flight PS752), en route from Tehran to Kyiv, crashed shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport early on January 8. There were 176 people on board the aircraft. All of them died. The crash killed 11 Ukrainians (two passengers and all nine crew), 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, ten Swedes, four Afghans, three Germans, and three Britons.
Iran had claimed that the plane had crashed due to an engine failure. However, early on January 11, Iran stated that it had shot down the Ukrainian passenger plane accidentally. The aircraft took off from the airport and was seen as an enemy target as it came close to an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base.
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May the UIA heroes rest in peace. π
It could be that the Iranians only felt compelled to admit culpability when they found that the victims were overwhelmingly their own people. If the passengers had been mainly Ukrainian or American I guess they would have continued bullshitting. I could only find two or three Ukrainian names in the deceased, which suggests that even most of the flight crew were of Iranian origin. Can anyone explain this?
All nine crew members were ukrainians.
Thatβs what I thought, but looking at the list I could only find two or three. There was also an entire family that had a Scandinavian family name.
Maybe the ukrainian passengers were tatars. As for the Scandinavians, they were either from Sweden or Canada.
Not Tatars. From the names listed, all obviously Iranian, except the ones I mentioned. Itβs puzzling. Unless the Ukrainians were omitted?
Flight crew comprised three pilots:
Captain Volodymyr Gaponenko (11600 hours on Boeing 737aircraft including 5500 hours as captain);
Instructor pilot Oleksiy Naumkin (12000 hours on Boeing 737 aircraft including 6600 hours as captain);
First officer Serhii Khomenko (7600 hours on Boeing 737 aircraft).
Cabin crew comprised six flight attendants:
Ihor Matkov, chief flight attendant;
Kateryna Statnik;
Mariia Mykytiuk;
Valeriia Ovcharuk;
Yuliia Solohub;
Denys Lykhno.
Thank you for that correct and very tragic list. The one I saw did not have those names.
As UIA said, these were their finest. Once again, thanks to nazi Russia, Ukraine has lost quality people: the kind that that they can ill afford to lose.
One cannot help thinking that it is overdue for some massive payback for the putinazis and Iβm not talking about innocents. I mean the psychopathic vermin that run the occupation and do the killing.
They surely were an elite crew. Superb pilots and four pretty flight attendants. Time to cancel all flights to Iran, Russia and Turkey. Then get the javelins to the frontline.
According to EP: escalation.
βPast 24 hours in the war zone
Escalation…
Russian-backed troops launch 15 attacks against Ukrainian positions in Luhansk, Donetsk and mariupol sectors, also using heavy artilley and mortars banned by Minsk.
3 Ukrainian soldiers wounded.
9 wounded soldiers delivered to Military Hospital in Kyiv.
A man who allegedly guarded the crash site & wreckage of Malaysian Airlines airliner flight MH17, shot down by Russia over eastern Ukraine in 2014, detained by Ukrainian border guards in Donetsk Oblast. The Ukrainian national, born in 1994, was arrested on a tip,
Escalation!β
Non of us that had any connection with or knew about or had flown with UIA had any doubts.