The Iranian citizen who published a video showing a missile hitting a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran has been arrested, according to the Iranian Fars news agency.
The results of the investigation will presented to the public, Fars said, without providing additional details.The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have taken responsibility for the missile strike which caused the plane crash, killing all 176 people aboard.
The New York Times verified security footage that showed two missiles hitting Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. The first missile disabled the plane's transponder before the second missile struck the plane. The video was filmed by a camera on a building four miles away from an Iranian military site.
New CCTV footage shows and confirms that 2 TOR missiles were fired at #PS752. #UkrainePlaneCrash #Iran pic.twitter.com/bKBqTeI1HO
— Aurora Intel (@AuroraIntel) January 14, 2020
The incident has been blamed on "human error." Ali Abdullahi, an official from the Iranian Armed Forces, told the Iranian Fars news agency that a system operator saw the plane as an approaching target and shot at it and that the military is investigating the possibility that electronic warfare played a role in the incident.
BREAKING: New video appears to show missile hitting Flight 752 before it crashed near Tehran, killing 176 people pic.twitter.com/Jb3Cy3OgUT
— BNO News (@BNONews) January 9, 2020
Several other arrests were made around the issue of the downing of the flight in which all 176 passengers were killed, said Gholamhossein Esmaili, the spokesman for Iran's judiciary, according to CNN. No details were provided about how many people were arrested or what they were being charged with.Iranian President Hassan Rouhani claimed that he was not informed about the causes of the crash for two days and that the Supreme National Security Council did not hold a meeting until Friday afternoon because he had been assured that the crash was caused by a technical failure, according to Radio Farda.Rouhani demanded that the Iranian Armed Forces to explain the entire process that occurred from the time of the crash. The president called the downing of the airliner an "unforgivable error" and said that a special court should be formed to probe the incident.The Iranian president dismissed claims that only one person, the operator of the air defense system, was to blame."Being more or less familiar with air defense issues I can say that in this matter we can't blame only one person. It is not as if only the person who hit the button [to fire the missile] was at fault, there were others too," said Rouhani on Tuesday. Rouhani stressed that while the US was to blame for the situation, that didn't mean that the government shouldn't investigate the "root causes" of the incident.
30 people have been arrested in protests that were sparked by the Iranian government's failure to admit that they had shot down the plane. The protests continued for the fourth day on Tuesday.Video from Shahid Beheshti University showed students responding "Basij and IRGC members are our ISIS," as pro-regime students chanted "Down with Israel, Down with Britain."Other students in Tehran chanted that they would give their lives to "take Iran back" and called on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to resign. The demonstrators stated that they wanted "strikes and revolution," not resolutions and reforms. Security forces are present around universities and are preventing students from leaving the campuses.Students at Amir Kabir Industrial University were locked in their campus and beat by Basij forces, according to some reports.Khamenei announced that he would be giving a sermon on Friday for the first time in eight years. Friday Prayers is the traditional pulpit for spreading the regime's messages, according to Radio Farda. The topic of the sermon has not been reported.