Canada says black boxes from Iran crash should be sent to France
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday urged Iran to send the black boxes from the passenger plane shot down by its forces 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 flight and cockpit data recorders from the jet, which he said were badly damaged.
Iran says it shot down Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 last week by accident, killing all 176 people aboard, 57 of whom were Canadian.
“Iran does not have the level of technical expertise and mostly the equipment necessary to be able to analyse these damaged black boxes quickly,” Trudeau said.
In the week since Tehran said its military had shot down the aircraft, Iran’s government has said international authorities looking into the tragedy would have access to the black-box data, but that has yet to happen, slowing the investigation.
More than two thirds of Canadians are not confident there will be a full and accurate account of the disaster, an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Friday said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held a rare face-to-face meeting with his Canadian counterpart, Francois-Philippe Champagne, on Friday in Muscat, Oman. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since 2012.
In a statement, Canada’s foreign ministry said Zarif agreed on the need for “a transparent analysis of the black box data,” and that the ministers “discussed the duty Iran has towards the families of the victims – including compensation”.
