TEHRAN – A senior Iranian judicial official has said that a final court verdict will be reached in the near future on the case of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 which was shot down mistakenly in early 2020.

Ahmadreza Pourkhaghan, who is the head of the Judicial Organization of Iran’s Armed Forces, said there will be a final court ruling on the case of the plane. 

“From the very beginning, the Judicial Organization of the Armed Forces looked into this issue and dealt with it in several stages in a detailed manner and with multilateral experts,” he said, according to Tasnim, adding that ten people have been prosecuted in this regard. 

He said the court procedures for this case took more than 20 sessions each of which lasted several hours. 

The procedures are over and a court ruling is expected in the near future, the judicial official said. 

Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was mistakenly downed by the Iranian military on January 8, 2020. It was mistaken for an invading missile by the United States.

Several rounds of negotiations have been held over the plane crash. “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, [2020] and ended with participants from Canada, Sweden & United Kingdom. Talks were constructive and fruitful,” Iran’s Ambassador to Ukraine Manouchehr Moradi tweeted in 2020. 

On January 11, 2020, the Armed Forces General Staff released a statement saying the Ukrainian passenger plane was mistakenly downed near a Tehran 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.