Authorities in Ukraine are not ruling out that one of its planes, which crashed early Wednesday in Iran killing all 176 passengers and crew, was brought down by a missile or an attack amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington.
The Ukrainian International airliner bound for the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, plunged from the sky minutes after takeoff from the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
The Boeing 737-800 was last seen on radar at 2,400 metres, according to the FlightRadar 24 monitoring website, hours after Tehran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at US facilities in neighbouring Iraq.
“We must investigate all possible causes,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook, shortly after Iranian officials said the crash was caused by a fire that struck one of the plane’s engines, causing the pilots to lose control.
Zelenskyy has ordered Ukrainian prosecutors to open
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