Zarif Gives Assurance Iran Fully Responsible on Plane Tragedy

Zarif on Saturday held talks with his Ukrainian counterpart on the accidental shoot-down of the Ukrainian plane in Tehran, which killed all the 176 people on board last month.

During the meeting in Munich, the two sides also conferred on Tehran-Kiev cooperation over the investigations into the incident.

Zarif and his Ukrainian counterpart, who were meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, also underlined efforts to relieve the pains of the survivors.

Later in the day, Zarif also attended a multilateral meeting with the foreign ministers of the countries involved in the plane tragedy – Canada, Germany, Afghanistan, Sweden, and Britain.

In that meeting, Zarif discussed the legal and technical aspects of the incident, and highlighted Iran’s responsibility over the issue.

He also underlined the need to avoid politicization of the incident.

Zarif once again expressed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s full preparedness for cooperation with Ukraine on the investigations and the settlement of the issue.

Earlier in an interview with NBC News, Zarif had stressed that the Islamic Republic will not hand over the Ukrainian plane’s black box even though it is not capable of extracting its data.

He said Western countries must provide Iran with the hardware and software required for the data extraction, and there are many things Iran wants to know from the black box.