Iran has sentenced 10 servicemen to prison on charges of involvement in the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane Boeing 737 of the UIA airline company in early January 2020.

As a result of the incident, all 176 people on board died.

Mizan Online, the official news portal of Iran’s judicial system, reports on the sentence to the servicemen of the country’s air defense forces.

The verdicts came after 20 court hearings after about three years of investigation.

The commander of the Tor-M1 air defense system was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and nine other soldiers received terms of imprisonment from one to three years.

As stated, the actions of the commander of the Tor-M1 air defense system, which led to the downing of the passenger plane, “were due to his ignorance of the situation and the mistaken belief that the detected air target was hostile”.

As previously reported, on January 8, 2020, a Boeing 737-800NG passenger plane of the “Ukraine International Airlines” flight Tehran-Kyiv (PS752) was shot down immediately after departure from the international airport of the capital of Iran.

All 176 people who were on board the plane died: 167 passengers and 9 crew members. Among the victims were citizens of Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany and Great Britain, as well as 11 Ukrainians (9 crew members and 2 passengers).

Days after denying it officially, Iran admitted that an air defense unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had accidentally shot down the plane.

On March 17 of this year, Iran presented the final report on the investigation into the UIA plane crash. The document states that the plane was destroyed due to an error by the air defense operator, who identified it as an “enemy target”.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine called the content of the document “a cynical attempt to hide the true reasons for the downing of the plane,” RFE/RL reports.

In 2020, Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded the title of Heroes of Ukraine to the crew members of the Boeing 737 plane of the Ukrainian Ukraine International Airlines, who died as a result of the plane crash in Iran.