`WHY DID YOU DO THIS?'
One year later, family members of those killed in the crash of Flight PS752 are still seeking accountability, Bruce Deachman reports.
Maral Gorginpour lost husband Fareed Arasteh just days after they wed when the Iranian military shot down Flight PS752 as it left Tehran on Jan. 8, 2020, killing all 176 on board. Iran has yet to give answers — or a formal apology — for what a special adviser's report to the prime minister calls an `internationally wrongful act.'
Maral Gorginpour spent her first wedding anniversary earlier this week without fanfare or celebration. She wondered how, days later, she might commemorate the first anniversary of her husband's death — Jan. 8, 2020 — when the airplane he was in on the first leg of his journey back to Ottawa from Tehran was shot down by Iranian forces. She planned on taking part in a rally Friday in Toronto, where she currently lives, but beyond that was simply too anguished to consider anything else.
“I can't plan anything in advance, because each time I do, when the moment arrives, I completely change my mind because my feelings are so mixed.
“It's sad when you lose your whole life,” she adds. “But when you don't know why you lost everything, it isn't manageable. It's so sad. I don't know how to explain it. There's nothing in any language to express my feelings.”
Her husband, Fareed Arasteh, then 32 and a Carleton University student, was aboard Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, which had just taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport en route to Kyev. About three minutes into its flight, the plane was hit by a surface-toair missile fired by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). Twenty-three seconds later, a second missile struck the craft. The plane crashed in a playground, killing all 167 passengers and nine crew members aboard. All but 29 of the plane's passengers, including 55 Canadians, 30 permanent residents of Canada, and 53 others, were travelling to Canada. It was Canada's deadliest aviation disaster in 35 years.
Also on the plane that day was Roja Azadian, who was travelling to Canada for the first time. Her husband, Mohsen Ahmadipour, who had emigrated to Canada four months earlier, was supposed to be in the seat beside her, but there had been a mixup with his ticket — an engineer, he had recently found work in the Ottawa area and, unable to change the departure date of his return ticket from Ottawa to Tehran, he purchased an additional one-way ticket. When he tried to check in online for the return portion of his original ticket, he discovered that because he hadn't used the first half of his return ticket, the remainder was no longer valid. He and his wife were given two options: they could book a flight together two days later, or she could fly to Canada, via Kyev, that morning, as planned, and Ahmadipour could follow on Jan. 10. They chose the latter option. Azadian, also an engineer and eight days shy of her 43rd birthday, had expressed concerns about coming to Canada. Her English, she worried, wasn't good enough. But Ahmadipour tried to allay her anxiety. She was a soprano in a choir in Iran, and Ahmadipour had emailed her links to some Ottawa choirs she could join.
“She loved teamwork,” he says, “and that was one of the reasons she joined the choir. I said to her, `Music is a common language that you can share together. It's not important that you cannot speak English very well as a Canadian; you can share your emotions with your music.' ”
As the Boeing 737 lifted off the runway at 6:12 that morning, an hour behind schedule, Azadian texted her husband to say they were finally in the air.
“I blamed myself for months,” says Ahmadipour. “I asked myself why we didn't cancel her ticket and travel together. I ask myself that every day. It's a continuous question in my life.”
A year after the downing of Flight PS752, Ahmadipour and Gorginpour, along with other victims' families and authorities around the world, are left with many unanswered questions.
“The first and the most important one for me is why Iran did this to such innocent people,” says Gorginpour. “If there was a chance of making a mistake, why didn't the airline decide not to fly at that time? And why is the Iran government avoiding answering us? It's been a year, and nothing has been answered yet. It's really hurtful and it doesn't help us to go through this pain.
“The only thing that I want from the Iran government is to answer my question: Why did you do this? Why did you do that crime?”
In his report on the incident, released last month, Ralph Goodale, special adviser to the prime minister, notes that many of the details remain unknown because Iran “has not conducted its investigations (safety, criminal or otherwise) in a truly independent, objective and transparent manner; and answers to critical questions have not been forthcoming.”
Iran, the report adds, “has committed an internationally wrongful act,” and is obligated to make full
I don't want to get paid. I want answers. It doesn't make sense not to answer the questions and just offer money. It just makes me angry. That money doesn't give my life back.
MARAL GORGINPOUR
We were coming (to Canada) to start our lives together. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, to have him in my life. I don't want to get paid. I want answers.
MARAL GORGIN POUR, and her late husband, Fareed Arasteh
full reparations, including “a full and candid account of what exactly happened, assurances that it won't happen again … and a formal apology.”
Goodale's report clearly blames Iran for its purposeful inaction in investigating the event. The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, however, is even harsher in its assessment.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran ruthlessly murdered our loved ones,” it said in a Dec. 22 statement, “our precious children, spouses, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, nieces and nephews, our friends, and our compatriots. The Islamic Republic of Iran killed 176 innocent passengers on board of Flight PS752 nearly a year ago, and ever since then, they have done everything to deny their crime while trying to hijack our grief in pretence. They dictated terms of ceremonial processes for funerals and memorials, to misappropriate the ceremonies, bury where they wanted to bury, and portray what they wanted to portray.”
“A murderer,” the group concluded, “may not be the grieving party.”
The shooting of Flight PS752 occurred as tensions between the U.S. and Iran were at a boiling point. On Dec. 27, 2019, Iran-backed militias fired rockets at U.S. positions near Kirkuk, Iraq, killing an American translator. Two days later, in retaliation, the U.S. attacked five suspected militia positions. On New Year's Eve, a pro-Iran demonstration in Baghdad turned into an assault on the U.S. embassy there. In a Jan. 3, 2020, drone attack near Baghdad's airport, the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC's Quds Force.
Iran, citing “proportionate measures in self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter,” retaliated at around 2 a.m. on Jan. 8, firing missiles for two hours at a pair of air bases in Iraq where U.S. troops were stationed. Two hours after that, Flight PS752, which had been cleared for takeoff and was on its scheduled flight path, was shot down.
“The most important question for me is who is the man responsible for deciding to shoot the missiles at the plane,” says Ahmadipour. “We can guess who it is, but we're not sure. They have to tell us who was responsible.
“The other important question is why they shot the missiles. I don't think they gained anything from it. The fighting between the U.S. in the Iranian government wasn't really critical fighting. The U.S. had killed Soleimani and the Iranian government needed to show they got revenge. But it was just a show. So why did they decide to down an airplane? It's an important question for me. Why did they shoot the missiles at the airplane? It wasn't a weapon, it wasn't from the U.S. It was taking off from the Iranian airport after checking any security items from the passengers. It was cleared to fly and on course. So why did they shoot it?”
Goodale's report reveals how Iran denied and obfuscated in the days and months following the incident. Three days passed before it admitted to shooting down the plane, and by the time that Transportation Safety Board of Canada officials arrived in Tehran to investigate, the crash site had already been compromised, with photo evidence suggesting that Iran had bulldozed the site as early as Jan. 10. And although Iran quickly announced the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, it failed to heed the International Civil Aviation Organization's requirement that it download and analyze the recorders “without delay,” instead waiting for more than six months to do so. Additionally, Goodale's report indicates that although six Iranians have been charged with offences related to the incident, their identities and any other details remain a mystery.
“This state of affairs raises obvious concerns about credibility, conflicts of interest, and a lack of transparency and accountability, especially in light of Iran's admission that its own military — specifically the IRGC — fired the missiles that downed this innocent commercial airliner, which had been fully cleared for takeoff by Iran's military and civilian authorities,” the report notes. “The party responsible for the situation is investigating itself, largely in secret. That does not inspire confidence or trust.”
Following the crash, Gorginpour hired a lawyer in Iran to try to get some answers from the government, but quickly realized the futility of that undertaking. “Nothing can be done there,” she says. “Even when we asked the authorities there to do something, to tell us something about the reason they did that, they didn't answer us.”
On Dec. 30, 2020, the Iranian government announced it would compensate the family of each victim with $150,000 US.
Ahmadipour thinks that figure a little too closely echoes the amount offered by the U.S. government after it shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988, a passenger flight, during the Iran-Iraq war, killing all 290 on board. While never apologizing, the U.S. agreed to pay $300,000 for each wage-earning passenger and $150,000 for each non-wage-earner, including the 66 children on board.
“Shooting a flight in your own country during peacetime is not the same as that one,” Ahmadipour says. “The international courts have to decide about the amount of the settlement.” He believes Iran is making the offer to discourage lawsuits.
And although Ahmadipour says he expects he may join a class-action suit against Iran, it's not a financial settlement he wants, but rather simply to hold Iran accountable. He and Azadian's family, he says, intend to donate any compensation they receive to charity. “Our concern is not about how much it is. We want to push the Iranian government to the international courts to be held responsible and face justice.”
Gorginpour is similarly disdainful of any financial settlement.
“We were coming here to start our lives together,” she says. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me, to have him in my life.
“I don't want to get paid. I want answers. It doesn't make sense not to answer the questions and just offer money. It just makes me angry. That money doesn't give my life back. I've just lost my everything and you're offering me money? What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything to me.
“I want to know, why did I lose my life, why did I lose my everything? I can't do anything normal in my life. What should I do with that money? I wish this disaster on no one, so it helps us to seek the truth.”
The most important question for me is who is the man responsible for deciding to shoot the missiles at the plane. We can guess who it is, but we're not sure. They have to tell us who was responsible.
MOHSEN AHMADIPOUR , who lost his wife, Roja Azadian