A senior Ukrainian security official has said his country’s investigators will explore a range of possible reasons why one of its passenger jets crashed in Iran, including a drone collision, a terrorist bomb and a missile attack, but did not rule out a technical fault was to blame.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, cited unconfirmed reports circulating on social media that debris from a Russian-made missile had been found at the site, on the outskirts of Tehran, where the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed on Wednesday, killing all 176 passengers and staff onboard.
“Our commission is currently agreeing with the Iranian authorities to travel to the place of the crash, and plans to search for debris of a Russian surface-to-air Tor missile, according to information which was published on the internet,” he said in a Facebook post on Thursday.
Some members of the investigative team had been involved in the probe into the 2014 shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine by Russian-armed rebels, Danilov added. “We will use all our best practices from investigating the attack on MH17 to find out the truth in the case of the Ukrainian plane in Tehran,” he said.
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The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, later called for a full investigation into the crash and the reports it could have been caused by something such as a stray missile, following a telephone conversation with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Downing Street said on Thursday.
In the phone call, Johnson offered his condolences, offered UK support and was updated on the crash, a No 10 spokesman said. “The prime minister said that there needed to be a full, credible and transparent investigation into what happened.”
Asked whether this meant the UK was concerned about the possible cause of the crash, he said: “I’m not going to speculate on this, but the reports we have seen are very concerning, and we’re urgently looking into them.”
Images have been widely circulated online by an Iranian activist showing the remains of what could be a Russian-made Tor-M1 missile that he claimed was found near the plane’s crash site – but there was no way to independently verify that the debris in the picture shows a missile or if it was taken in the debris field on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said earlier on Thursday that his government was considering “several possibilities” but asked people to refrain from speculating about the crash. Iranian authorities have blamed mechanical issues, which they said happened shortly after the plane left Tehran’s main airport at 6.13am on Wednesday.
The timing of the disaster, a few hours after Iran fired ballistic missiles at US forces stationed in Iraq in retaliation for its assassination of general Qassem Suleimani, has fuelled speculation that it might have somehow been linked to the hostilities, but so far there has been no evidence to back this up.