TEHRAN, Jul. 20 (MNA) – The military prosecutor of Tehran province announced that the decoding operation for the black boxes of the Ukrainian plane has been started with the presence of the Military Court' representatives.

"On Friday, the black boxes of the Ukrainian Boeing 737 passenger plane were transported to Paris by Iranian Civil Aviation Organization to be decoded in the specialized laboratories of France" Gholam Abbas Torki announced.

According to the rules of the International Aviation Organization, related countries, including the United States of America as the manufacturer, Ukraine as the owner of this plane as well as Canada, Sweden and Afghanistan whose citizens died in this incident, have been invited to attend this operation, he said.

“Representatıves of the Civil Aviation Organization of Iran, along with a representative of the Tehran Military Court will be attending the decoding operation,” he added.

By mentioning that the black boxes of this plane have not been decoded before, he announced that “as France's laboratories have the necessary technical facilities to decode black box information, Iran has decided to send the black boxes of Flight 752 to Paris.”

The Tehran-Kyiv flight was unintentionally shot down by an air defense unit shortly after taking off from Tehran on January 8, killing all 176 passengers and crew members on board. Among the victims of the PS752 flight, many were Iranian-Canadians, but there were also victims from Sweden, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

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. Tehran has agreed to compensate the families of the foreign victims of the downed plane.

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