An Iranian couple has filed a rare lawsuit against three senior officials over the death of their children in the 2020 downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane, a newspaper reported Monday.
Mohsen Assadi-Lari told reformist daily Shargh the lawsuits targeted Ali Shamkhani, Major General Hossein Salami and Brig. Gen. Amirali Hajjizadeh.
Shamkhani is the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Salami heads the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, while Hajjizadeh is commander of the Guards’ aerospace force.
“We have lodged a complaint against Shamkhani, Salami and Hajjizadeh,” said Assadi-Lari, a former director general of international affairs at the health ministry.
He and his wife Zahda Majd, a university professor, lost their son Mohammad-Hossein, 23, and daughter Zeinab, 21, in the downing of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752.
It was shot down shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 people on board. Most were Iranians and Canadians, including many dual nationals.
Three days later, the Islamic republic’s armed forces admitted to downing the Kyiv-bound plane “by mistake.”
Iranian families of victims last week marked the second anniversary of the tragedy by gathering at the crash site near Tehran airport, demanding justice for those who died.
They held up pictures of their loved ones, laid flowers and lit candles in their memory, while calling for “Justice! Truth!,” videos shared on social media showed.
And in another rare move, state television has run an interview with the mother of Zahra Hassani Saadi, who also died in the crash, questioning the authorities’ handling of the case.
“We have several questions, who will answer us? Why wasn’t the flight canceled? Why was the cruise missile fired? We don’t know and no one has explained it to us,” she said.
Last week, Iranian officials said payments of $150,000 have started to be made to victims’ families.
Separately, a Canadian court said it has awarded more than $80 million in compensation to the families of six of the victims.
At the time of the downing two years ago, Iranian air defenses were on high alert for a US counterattack after Tehran fired missiles at a military base in Iraq that was used by American forces.
Those missiles came in response to the killing in a US drone attack in Baghdad of Major General Qassem Soleimani who headed the Guards’ foreign operations arm.
