It is nothing short of a tragedy that it was an Iranian missile attack, unintentionally as claimed by the Iranian authorities, which destroyed the Boeing 737 of Ukrainian International Airlines that led to the death of as many as 176 persons. It is also highly regrettable that it took as many as four days for Iran to admit that the accident was the result of ‘human error”.  

The plane was shot down early Wednesday, hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on two military bases housing US troops in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani by an American airstrike in Baghdad.  

While Iran admitted responsibility, this admission came only after the US and Canada, citing intelligence, said that they believed Iran shot down the aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, a conclusion supported by verified videos later. Ever since the plane crash the Iranian authorities repeatedly ruled out a missile strike, dismissing such allegations as Western propaganda that Iranian officials stressed was offensive to the victims.

Iran's acknowledgement of responsibility for the crash is likely to inflame public sentiment against authorities after Iranians had rallied around their leaders in the wake of Qasem Soleimani’s assassination. The majority of the plane crash victims were Iranians or Iranian-Canadians. The sympathy Iran had following the Soleimani assassination may also wither away.   

Now that Iran has admitted its responsibility it also should bring all those who were responsible for the horrific incident to justice. Saying that the country was ‘sorry’ for their ‘mistake’ is surely not enough. Iran needs to offer apology to nations that suffered the tragedy through diplomatic channels, because the dead had nothing to do with the political imbroglio in the region. Many families lost their dear ones and suffered a profound sense of loss and sorrow for the ‘mistake’.

In such incidents it is often difficult to demarcate the line between mistake and willful negligence. The kith and kin of the victims must be given adequate compensation, albeit no amount of monetary benefit can be enough when people know that it was not a conventional aeroplane accident but a missile attack that led to the instantaneous death of so many people.

 As the missile attacks on the American bases in Iraq were carried out by the Revolutionary Guards, there were suspicions that the elite force was responsible for destroying the plane. The suspicions proved to be right. The force, according to many observers has a track record of bypassing the authorities and carrying out deadly attacks even outside Iran. Iranian government may think of putting a system in place so that no force can act independently without express orders from the government.