Downed Plane Victim's Father Marches To Ottawa To Demand Justice

The father of one of the victims aboard Ukrainian Flight 752, which was shot down by Iran’s missiles in 2020, has arrived in Ottawa after marching for over two weeks to meet Canada’s premier.

Mehrzad Zarei, father of 17-year-old Arad who died in the shootdown, who had started his symbolic 400-kilometer march from his son's grave in Richmond Hill, Ontario, arrived in Ottawa Thursday hoping to personally deliver his protest letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

With Trudeau out of town, Zarei held a meeting with parliamentary secretary to the prime minister Greg Fergus instead. Family members of other victims from Flight 752 who held photos of their loved ones and remained outside the Prime Minister's Office.

"Today's message, we say, enough is enough," Zarei told reporters before the meeting, and went on to read his letter addressed to Trudeau.

Criticizing a lack of justice for the victims of the incident, he demands that Canada designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, as was stipulated by a Canadian parliament's resolution in 2018. Other demands include Canadian sanctions on Iranian authorities and for the case to be pursued at the International Court of Justice, and The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Having planned a sit-in in front of the parliament, the family members will return to Ottawa on October 4 to mark 1,000 days since the flight was shot down and to renew their calls for justice.

The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Only hours earlier, the IRGC had fired more than a dozen missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops in retaliation for the killing of the IRGC Qods Force Commander Ghasem Soleimani who was killed in Baghdad by a US drone strike just five days earlier.