MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th January, 2020) The head of Iran's civil aviation investigative authority, Hassan Rezaeifar, said on Sunday that Iran was independently decoding the flight data recorders from the downed Ukrainian plane and that Tehran has not yet decided whether the black boxes would be sent abroad, the country's official news agency IRNA reported.
"We are trying to decypher the black boxes here in Iran; otherwise, our options are Ukraine and France, but no decision has been taken so far to send them to another country," the media outlet quoted Rezaeifar as saying.
Last week, the Iranian aviation official said that the flight recorders would be sent to a third country as Iran itself lacked the technology to decode the device's data. On Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said that his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, gave him assurances that the black boxes of the downed Boeing 737-800 would be sent to Ukraine.
Rezaeifar added that should the Ukrainian specialists fail to decode data from the flight recorders, the devices will be sent to France, a country with which Iran has an agreement that regulates downloading of data from black boxes.
Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashed near Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport minutes after takeoff on January 8. All 176 people on board were killed. The crash occurred shortly after Iran launched airstrikes against US bases in neighboring Iraq. Three days later, the Iranian military admitted to unintentionally shooting down the jetliner, having confused it with a hostile cruise missile in anticipation of a retaliatory strike from the US.
