The top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, Major General Hossein Salami, has expressed his deepest condolences, saying he had never felt more ashamed in his life than after the Ukrainian passenger jet tragedy.
Debriefing the session of Iran’s parliament on Sunday, Salami stated that IRGC has no other purpose or wish “but to be torn into pieces for the sake of the security, welfare and peace of [Iranian] people.”
I swear on the life of my children… I wish I were inside that plane and fell down and burned along with those loved ones instead of witnessing this tragic incident.
The Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was misidentified as an incoming cruise missile, according to Iran’s military, which was on high alert at the time of the incident following a strike against US assets in Iraq. According to IRGC, the military never sought to hide the incident and immediately notified authorities, yet this information was not immediately publicly disclosed, pending an internal probe, as a due procedure was to be followed.
Among the 176 people who perished in the tragedy, some 147 were Iranians – including dozens of students with dual Canadian citizenship. Some of the mass vigils held for the victims across Iran turned into anti-government rallies, while western officials and establishment figures spared no effort to show how much they supposedly admire the ‘courage’ of Iranians who took to the streets to vent their anger and clash with authorities.
