In a ruling in a Canadian court on Monday, the Iranian regime were ordered to pay $84 million to the families of the 85 Canadian victims who lost their lives on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in January 2020, which was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Lawyers representing the families of the victims have stated that if the regime ignore the civil lawsuit’s ruling, there is an option to secure a portion of the compensation by seizing some of Iran’s assets. Similar lawsuits are being conducted around the world in the home countries of the other victims.
Flight 752, which was due to travel from Tehran to Kyiv, Ukraine, when an IRGC missile hit the airplane moments after take-off, killing all 176 people on board.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said, “Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility but days later in the face of evidence both from Western intelligence agencies and local video footage, they were forced to abandon ridiculous narratives.”
The regime has consistently put the blame on an air defense operator and their failure to distinguish between a civilian aircraft and a foreign missile, stating that at that time there were heightened tensions in the region following Iran’s attack on US assets in Iraq in response to the assassination of the IRGC Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani. Since the incident, the regime has withheld the aircraft’s black box and downplayed any negligence on their part.
The Canadian government carried out its own forensic investigation in the middle of 2020, and came to the conclusion that the regime was criminally responsible. Last May, Justice Edward Belobaba ruled that “the missile attacks were intentional” and that “the shooting down of the civilian aircraft constituted terrorist activity under applicable federal law.”
The NCRI said, “Relatives of some of the victims appeared at a press conference on Tuesday. When the video feed of the conference was disrupted, suspicions grew about a coordinated effort by the Iranian regime to counter the message of victims’ families and their supporters.”
During the Zoom meeting, the video suddenly switched to a vulgar rap video, with an unidentified man appearing on the screen, after which the organizers of the event promptly ended the session and restarted it.
Recently, the Iranian regime’s President Ebrahim Raisi echoed the regime’s promise that they still plan to retaliate in regards to Soleimani’s assassination. Raisi has also demanded that the former US president Donald Trump and the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who were both in office at the time of the strike, should be prosecuted in a court ran by the mullahs.
In his speech, Raisi stated, “The aggressor, murderer, and main culprit — the then-president of the United States — must be tried and judged under the law of retribution, and God’s ruling must be carried out against him.”
It appears that his statement implied that the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may issue a religious decree (fatwa) to call for Trump’s assassination, as well as other US officials.
The NCRI said, “The shooting down of a civilian airliner was clearly an act of intentional terrorism for which the IRGC and the entire regime must be held accountable immediately. Otherwise, more tragedies will certainly ensue.”
