2023-07-03 19:18:00
At 10:45 a.m. Tehran time, as the plane was leaving Bandar Abbas airport, the US Navy launched two anti-aircraft missiles from the cruise ship USS Vincennes without warning or signal, reaching the passenger aircraft at an altitude of 4,000 meters. As a result, the air vehicle was completely destroyed.
There was 274 passengers on board, including children under the age of 13, and 16 members of the crew; all perished. Iranian citizens were the most numerous (238), but people from Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, India, Yugoslavia and Italy were also traveling on board. The wreckage of the plane sank in Iranian territorial waters.
Iran openly claimed that this was a deliberate act of aggression by the United States. Washington presented its own version, alleging that its cruise ship — which was in the region under the excuse of defending Kuwaiti oil tankers — mistook this passenger plane for an F-14 fighter of the Persian country.
The US side claimed that the cruise crew tried to contact the aircraft by radio, but received no response. It was later found that the US had used emergency military and commercial frequencies for communications, without enunciating the code of the Iranian plane. As a result, Iranian pilots they mightn’t even guess that someone was giving them notices or calling them to communicate.
It is noteworthy that Washington has never acknowledged its guilt or responsibility for what happened and has not presented no public apology to TehranNot to mention that the then US President, Ronald Reagan, offered voluntary compensation of $250,000 to the families of the deceased, in addition to describing the actions of the US Army as “justified defense”.
The families they declined the offerwhile the crew of the military ship was decorated by the US Administration with orders of valor and medals “for the effective fulfillment of the combat mission”.
Iran launched a lawsuit once morest the US authorities at the United Nations (UN) International Court of Justice in 1989, and the process dragged on for years. The main condition was to get the United States to publicly admit its guilt and apologize, in order to be punished under international law.
It was not until 1996 when a conciliation agreement was signed between the two countries, following which the case was dismissed. Although the United States paid $131.8 million in compensation, never accepted responsibility of what happened nor apologized to the families of the Iranian victims.
That is why Tehran continues to consider July 3 a day of great injustice and international impunity for the American crime.
He also considered that the most serious aspect of the tragedy is that “a State that claims to be the leader of the civilized world, with all its hypocritical verbiage and its declarations regarding the fight once morest terrorism, can destroy human progress and leave hundreds of mourning families in such a disgusting way”.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader of iranRecalling the events of those days, I declare: “the plane crash suffered by our passenger plane, intentionally shot down by the US, (is) the most bitter incident and literally burned our hearts.”
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