TEHRAN: The crew of a Ukrainian jetliner that crashed in Iran, killing all 176 people on board, never made a radio call for help and was trying to turn back for the airport when the burning plane went down, an initial Iranian investigative report said on Thursday.

Ukraine, meanwhile, said it considered a missile strike as one of several possible theories for the crash, despite Iran’s denials.

The Iranian report suggests that a sudden emergency struck the Boeing 737 operated by Ukrainian Interna­tional Airlines early on Wednesday morning, when it crashed, just minutes after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.

Investigators from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation offered no immediate explanation for the disaster, however. Iranian officials initially blamed a technical malfunction for the crash, something initially backed by Ukrainian officials before they said they wouldn’t speculate amid an ongoing investigation.

US officials say the jet was probably brought down accidentally by Tehran’s anti-aircraft missiles

The crash came just a few hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack against Iraqi military bases housing US troops amid a confrontation with Washington over the killing of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general in a US drone strike last week.

The Ukrainian passenger plane took off at 6:12am local time, after nearly an hour’s delay at Imam Khomeini Airport. It gained altitude heading west, reaching nearly 8,000 feet, according to both the report and flight-tracking data.

Then something went wrong, though no radio messages were received from the pilot regarding unusual situations, the report said. In emergencies, pilots reach out to air-traffic controllers to warn them and to clear the runway for their arrival, though their first priority is to keep the aircraft flying.

Eyewitnesses, including the crew of another flight passing above it, described seeing the plane engulfed in flames before crashing at 6:18am, the report said. Flight-tracking data for the plane stopped before the crash, which occurred in the town of Shahedshahr to the northeast of the plane’s last reported position. That’s the wrong direction of the flight plan, bolstering the report’s claim that the pilots tried to turn the aircraft back to the airport.

The crash caused a massive explosion when the plane hit the ground, likely because the aircraft had been fully loaded with fuel for the flight to Kiev, Ukraine.

The report also confirmed that both of the so-called black boxes that contain data and cockpit communications from the plane had been recovered, though they sustained damage and some parts of their memory was lost. It also said that investigators have initially ruled out laser or electromagnetic interference as causing the crash.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security Council, told media that officials had several working theories regarding the crash, including a missile strike.

“A strike by a missile, possibly a Tor missile system, is among the main (theories), as information has surfaced on the internet about elements of a missile being found near the site of the crash,” Danilov said. He did not elaborate on where he saw the information on the internet.

Ukrainian investigators who arrived in Iran earlier on Thursday currently await permission from Iranian authorities to examine the crash site and look for missile fragments, Danilov said.

Iran did not immediately respond to the Ukrainian comments. However, Gen Abolfazl Shekarchi, the spokesman for the Iranian armed forces, denied a missile hit the aeroplane in comments reported on Wednesday by the semiofficial Fars news agency. He dismissed the allegation as “psychological warfare” by foreign-based Iranian opposition groups.

Ukraine has a grim history with missile attacks, including in July 2014 when one such strike downed a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.

Danilov also said other possible causes under consideration included a drone or another flying object crashing into the plane, a terrorist attack or an engine malfunction causing an explosion. However, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack and the plane was only three years old.

Oleksandr Zaporozhchenko, a mechanic with the Ukraine International Airlines in 2016-18, said he knew one of the crew members of the plane and had never heard any complaints about the aircraft.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he planned to call Iranian President Hassan Rouhani about the crash and the investigation. Undoubtedly, the priority for Ukraine is to identify the causes of the plane crash, Zelenskiy said. “We will surely find out the truth,” he said.

US claim

The Ukrainian airliner was most likely brought down accidentally by Iranian anti-aircraft missiles, US officials said on Thursday.

According to satellite data, one US official said, the Ukrainian plane was airborne for two minutes after departing Tehran when the heat signatures of two surface-to-air missiles were detected.

That was quickly followed by an explosion in the plane’s vicinity, the official said. Heat signature data then showed the plane on fire as it went down.

Iran’s head of civil aviation was quoted by ISNA News Agency as saying that it was “impossible that a missile hit the Ukrainian plane”.

Two US officials said Washington believed the downing of the plane was accidental.

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday the deadly crash could have been a mistake and he did not believe it was a mechanical issue.

Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration declined to comment on Thursday, as did the Pentagon.

Published in Dawn, January 10th, 2020