Marc Garneau made the announcement on Friday, saying that Canada agrees with Iran's new decision to send the black boxes from a downed Ukraine Airlines jetliner directly to France instead of Ukraine, and wants it to happen as soon as possible.
“We think it is perfectly acceptable, in fact it is a good idea to send those black boxes to France,” Garneau said.
“We know that the BEA, which is an agency in France like our Transportation Safety Board, has the capability and the expertise to analyze these boxes and we are strongly encouraging Iran to move those boxes to Paris as quickly as possible," he added.
Farhad Parvaresh, Iran’s representative on the ICAO, said that Iran didn’t fulfill that pledge because COVID-19 suddenly shut down most of the world’s air routes and made travel difficult for all the parties that need to be there for the analysis.
He added that Iran has now reached out to the French agency and asked it to accept the equipment directly, as soon as all the other countries affected by the crash can travel to France.
Previously, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal Affairs Mohsen Baharvand voiced Iran's readiness for delivering the black box of Flight 752 to a French or any other foreign company with the technology of decoding it for decryption.
He informed that negotiations with Ukraine on transferring the black box to its accorded destination for decryption are underway but not finalized.
The Tehran-Kyiv flight was unintentionally shot down by an Iranian air defense unit shortly after taking off from Tehran on January 8, killing all 176 passengers and crew members on board.
The Iranian operator was reported to have mistaken the Boeing jetliner for a cruise missile.
The incident came as Iranian air defenses were at the highest level of alert following the country’s missile attacks against US bases in Iraq, which came in retaliation for Washington’s assassination of senior Iranian commander Lieutenant General Qasem Soleimani.
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