Iran will publish a report on the shooting down in January 2020 of a Ukrainian civil aircraft shortly after take-off from Tehran, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said on Monday [December 21]. All 176 people onboard the flight − including Canadian, American, British, Afghan, German and Swedish citizens – died.

“The technical report will be published today or tomorrow, before the anniversary of the tragedy and will be sent online to the Ukrainian side and other concerned parties,” Khatibzadeh told his weekly press briefing. “We will do our best to be transparent.”

Khatibzadeh criticized Canada for what he said was “meddling and unacceptable statements from day one” and suggested its government and foreign minister of Canada should be held “accountable for their actions.”

On December 15, Canada’s foreign minister François-Philippe Champagne said he did not believe the shooting down of the plane was due to human error, as Iran has said. “I will question everything they say because I take nothing at face value,” Champagne told CBC News. “I have questions because there’s too many examples that we’ve seen where ... they have not been forthcoming.”

Canada commissioned a report from Ralph Goodale, a special advisor to the prime minister, published on December 15, that made recommendations for Canada’s approach to air disasters. Goodale drew no specific conclusions over PS752 though he said Iran had “not yet been forthcoming” in answering questions posed by Canada − including why it left open its airspace in the hours after launching ballistic missiles at United States bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US killing Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad five days earlier.

Goodale said the process had been complicated by Canada’s lack of diplomatic relations with Iran since 2012 and by its listing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), whose defense battery downed the plane, as a “terrorist” organization.

The Canadian government has repeatedly urged Iran for greater transparency in the investigations and involvement of the countries whose nationals died in the tragedy. For two days, the Iranian authorities denied the plane had been hit by a missile but eventually accepted responsibility and attributed the firing of the missiles to human error.  The flight recorders of PS752 were downloaded at Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la Sécurité de l’Aviation Civile (BEA) laboratory in Paris in July.

On November 21 Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mohsen Baharvand accused Canada of “hampering Iran’s efforts to clarify the truth,” taking “ unilateral actions” and “politicizing the issue.” Baharvand, who has headed two rounds of talks in Kyiv with Ukraine on the crash, insisted that Iran had provided “everything that was needed for the Canadian side,” including access to the flight recorders.