TEHRAN – Iran’s Ambassador to Ukraine Manouchehr Moradi has said that second round of talks over the Ukrainian plane crash in early January will be held in October in Tehran.

“The first round of negotiations between Iran and Ukraine about #ps752 issues was held in Kiev during the visit of Iranian delegation to Kiev on 30-31 July and ended with participants from Canada, Sweden & United Kingdom. Talks were constructive and fruitful. Second round to be held on Oct. 2020 in Tehran,” Moradi tweeted on Saturday.

The Ukrainian airliner was shot down shortly after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on January 8, killing all 167 passengers and 9 crew members.

On January 11, the Armed Forces General Staff released a statement saying the Ukrainian passenger plane was mistakenly downed near the airport. 

The incident happened a few hours after Iran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at a U.S. airbase inside Iraq in retaliation for the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.

The airplane had been mistaken for an invading missile.

Iran has sent the black box of the passenger plane to France for decoding.

The Iranian embassy in France announced on July 21 that the preliminary analysis of the recovered data from the black boxes is underway in the BEA laboratory in France.

According to the embassy, a team of Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran in a joint effort with the French side began to decode the black boxes the prior day, Mehr reported.

On the first day of this joint technical cooperation, a delegation of Iranian experts and a group of French laboratory experts succeeded in recovering the FDR (flight data recording) section in the black boxes of the plane, it added.

NA/PA