Iran says claims that missile caused plane crash make ‘no sense’

Iran rules out a missile strike as the cause of a Ukrainian passenger plane crash near Tehran, saying such a scenario makes “no sense.”

The plane crashed shortly after take off yesterday, killing all 176 people on board, shortly after Iran fired a volley of missiles against military bases in Iraq housing US personnel.

“Several internal and international flights were flying at the same time in Iranian airspace at the same altitude of 8,000 feet (2,440 meters),” Iran’s transport ministry says.

“This story of a missile striking a plane cannot be correct at all,” it says in a statement.

“Such rumors make no sense,” Ali Abedzadeh, head of Iran’s civil aviation organization and deputy transport minister, says in the statement.

Abedzadeh is reacting to reports by US media that the Boeing 737 was hit by a missile and social media rumors that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is to blame.

He says Iran and Ukraine are in the process of “downloading information” from black boxes retrieved from the crash site.

“But if more specialized work is required to extract and analyse the data, we can do it in France or another country,” he adds.

— AFP