"The General Staff of the Iranian armed forces has received information about the real reason why Ukraine fell, right on the morning of 8.1 after the aircraft was shot down, but did not notify the Iranian Civil Aviation Administration," - the aerospace commander of the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) Amir Ali Hajizade stated at the press conference on 11.1.
"The Civil Aviation Authority was not informed about the cause of the crash as a missile, so they have no information. I have known about this since the morning of January 8. The General Staff of the Armed Forces has set up a team to investigate the incident and those who receive information about this incident are quarantined, and we are prohibited from saying anything, Hajizadeh said at a press conference broadcast on IRIB.
According to Mr. Hajizade, the Civil Aviation Authority staff did not know anything and did everything right, so all responsibility belongs to the IRGC and the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces.
I have proposed suspending all commercial flights in Iran until tensions with the US cool down. But those in the Armed Forces General Staff said they had to ask the government and the Civil Aviation Authority for opinions, so they did not stop commercial flights, Hajizadeh added.
According to CNN, the IRGC's aerospace force commander partially blamed the US for the shot down of a Ukrainian plane, saying Iran was on high alert after the US warned that it could target 52 Iranian locations, and in the context of increased tensions with the country.
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said his unit was fully responsible for the crash of the Ukrainian plane. "When I heard about the plane crash that killed all 176 people, I thought I had died," Hajizadeh said on Iranian state television on January 11.
The victims of the plane crash include 82 Iranian people, 63 Canads, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, 4 Afghanistanese people, 3 Germans and 3 British people.
"Human error at the time of crisis caused by American adventureism led to the disaster of mistakenly shooting down Ukrainian aircraft," Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter on January 11.
