TEHRAN - Minister of Transport and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami said on Sunday that the final report on the Ukrainian plane crash will be published soon.

“Information gathered by investigation team of the Civil Aviation Organization and also observations have been conformed to data of the black box, and Iran is supposed to reach a final conclusion at the presence of an Ukrainian delegation and issue the final statement,” Eslami told reporters.

Asked about the accurate date of publishing the final report, he said Iran is waiting for coordination with the Ukrainian team.

Deputy Foreign Minister for International and Legal Affairs Mohsen Baharvand also said last week that the final report on the Ukrainian plane crash will be published soon.

“The International Civil Aviation Organization and the people will be informed about the report. There will be advices in the report to prevent such incidents in future,” Baharvand told IRNA.

He also said that next round of talks over the incident will be held in Tehran in October.

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 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 sent the black box of the passenger plane to France for decoding in July.

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

On the first day of the 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.

NA/PA