A former Iranian regime official and his wife have spoken out about Flight PS752 that was shot down by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in January 2020, claiming that it was targeted by missiles in order to create a human shield against a presumed attack by the United States.

Mohammad-Hossein and Zeinab, the children of Mohsen Asadi-Iari, a former Minister in the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and his wife Zahra Majd, were among the 176 passengers who were killed on the Ukraine International Airlines flight shortly after take-off from Tehran, headed towards the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

Mohsen and Zahra explained, during an interview with the Sharq daily on January 10, that they had been told, 40 days following the incident, by IRGC commander Hossein Salami that if the plane had not been shot down, the IRGC would have been at war with the U.S.

Asadi-lari said, “We have actually come to the conclusion that they shot down this [airliner] and we have noted this in [Facebook] pages of our children that they [IRGC] wanted to down it and put the blame on the U.S.  as they had done it before by taking similar actions.”

Majd stated, “They [the officials] say openly that if the plane had not been downed a destructive war would erupted the next day and the lives of 10 million people would have been in danger.”

She also expressed that under the climate of fear of speaking out against the Iranian regime and their affiliated organizations, other families of the victims living in Iran refrain from talking to the media.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said, “The couple also noted that not only were they prevented from entering the crash site in the hours after the incident, but also the regime had not yet delivered any of their children’s belongings, except for Zainab’s burned passport”.

Asadi-Iari believes that information regarding the attack was among the belongings of his children, and that they may have recorded their final moments on their phones. Of course, the regime would be unwilling to make such information public.

He said, “Most families were like this, and perhaps in a few rare cases, they were made available to families, after the information had been erased. These are questions themselves that need to be answered.”

The court case regarding the attack in Iran was labelled, ‘the Ukrainian airlines accident investigation’, a phrase which Asadi-Iari, and other families of the victims, highly object to. In their eyes, the tragedy is an ‘unprecedented crime’.

Asadi-Iari claimed that regime authorities are refusing to allow the families access to the reports on the incident because, “there are issues that, if clarified, will clearly clarify the contradictions with the facts and other published reports and other claims made so far by the regime.”