OTTAWA, Jan 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Iran to send the flight and cockpit data recorders from a crashed jet to France for analysis and said the first remains of victims should soon arrive back in Canada.
Trudeau told a news conference in Ottawa that France was one of the few countries with the ability to read the plane’s so-called black boxes, which he said were badly damaged.
Iran says it shot down the Ukrainian airliner last week by accident. A total of 176 people died in the disaster, of which 57 were Canadian.
“Iran does not have the level of technical expertise and mostly the equipment necessary to be able to analyze these damaged black boxes quickly,” Trudeau said.
“There is a beginning of a consensus that … (France) would be the right place to send those black boxes to get proper information from them in a rapid way and that is what we are encouraging the Iranian authorities to agree to.”
Trudeau said about 20 families of Canadian victims had requested the return of the bodies and told reporters he expected the first remains to be repatriated “in the coming days.” He did not give more details.
In KIEV, Ukraine said Iran was ready to hand over the black box flight recorders of the Ukrainian passenger plane downed by an Iranian missile.
The Kiev-bound Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737, crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran last Wednesday, killing all 176 people on board, mostly Iranian and Canadian citizens.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said Iran would grant a team of investigators from Iran and Canada as the countries that have lost the most nationals access to the recorders.
“After that, the Iranian side is ready to separately transfer the black boxes to Ukraine,” Vadym Prystaiko told lawmakers during a parliamentary session.
“This is consistent with international standards, although we still demand that they be given to us immediately to ensure the independence and objectivity of the investigation,” Prystaiko said.
Prystaiko said that Kiev has “good cooperation” with Tehran on the crash probe, but lacked “access to the information stored in the black boxes”.
“We just want to know that nobody will be tampering with the recordings themselves,” he said.
Prystaiko said an Iranian official will visit Kiev next week “to apologise officially and provide explanations”.
On Thursday, Canada, Ukraine, Sweden, Afghanistan and Britain issued a five-point plan for cooperation with Iran during the investigation, calling for “full and unhindered access” for foreign officials.
