Leaked recording shows Iran knew it shot down Ukrainian plane

Iran’s government knew their military had shot down a passenger jet and lied about it for days, Ukraine said Sunday.
A leaked audio recording surfaced of an Iranian pilot communicating with air-traffic control in Tehran. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy acknowledged the recording’s authenticity in a report aired by a Ukrainian television channel.
The head of Iran’s investigation team, Hassan Rezaeifar, said the recording was handed over to the Ukrainian officials in Tehran on Monday. He also said it was legitimate.
The Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 passenger jet carrying 176 people crashed minutes after takeoff from Tehran on 7 January, killing all on board. The crash of the aircraft came hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Iraqi bases housing US soldiers, in retaliation for a US drone strike that killed Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known. However, Iranian authorities first said the crash was likely caused by “technical difficulties”, and insisted for days it was not a missile that brought down the plane.
Days later, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani said an investigation into the tragedy had found “missiles fired due to human error” brought down the plane, and called it an “unforgivable mistake”.
In the leaked recording, a pilot for Iran Aseman Airlines reportedly radioed the air-traffic control tower to say he saw the “light of a missile”. The control tower appears to be unsuccessfully attempting to reach the plane on the radio as the Iranian pilot says he saw “an explosion”:
“Dear engineer, it was an explosion. We saw a very big light there, I don’t really know what it was”, the pilot says.
Iranian authorities condemned the publication of the recording as “unprofessional,” saying it was part of a confidential report.