Photo taken on Jan. 8, 2020 shows an Iranian soldier working at the crash site of the Ukrainian passenger plane in Parand district, southern Tehran, Iran. Iran has asked the French and U.S. accident investigation agencies, the BEA and NTSB respectively, for the equipment to decode the black box of the crashed Ukrainian plane, Press TV reported on Tuesday. On Jan. 8, the Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 aircraft from Tehran to Kiev crashed near Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all the passengers and crew members on board. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)
TEHRAN, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iran has asked the French and U.S. accident investigation agencies, the BEA and NTSB respectively, for the equipment to decode the black box of the crashed Ukrainian plane, Press TV reported on Tuesday.
On Jan. 8, the Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 aircraft from Tehran to Kiev crashed near Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, killing all the passengers and crew members on board.
Later, Iran's armed forces confirmed that an "unintentional" launch of a military missile by the country shot down the Ukrainian airliner.
The latest report by Iran's civil aviation agency noted that two Tor-M1 missiles were fired at the airliner from the north, and how the projectiles contributed to the crash were still under investigation.
The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, commonly known as black boxes, feature cutting-edge technology and Iran lacks the technical facilities to decode them, according to the report.
"If devices are provided, the information (on the black boxes) can be restored and retrieved in a short period of time," the report said.
Iran's civil aviation agency has requested French and U.S. accident investigation agencies to provide a list of the equipment required to decode the black boxes, and to possibly transfer them to Iran, it said.
However, neither organization has "so far responded positively" to the request, and Iran is considering the purchase of those equipment, it added.
On Sunday, Hassan Rezaeefar, director of incident investigation of Iran's civil aviation agency, said that Iran was trying to decode the black box of the crashed passenger plane before planning to send it to a second country.
"Iran holds the black box of the Ukrainian Boeing 737 passenger plane and has currently no plan to send it out," Rezaeefar was quoted as saying by official IRNA news agency.
"We are trying to read the data of the damaged Ukrainian plane inside Iran. Ukraine and France are our next options (for reading the data), but we have not decided on sending it to a second country yet," he added.
Rezaeefar earlier told IRNA that Iran possesses no technology to download and read the data of the Ukrainian plane's black box since it is "a modern and advanced Boeing passenger plane."
