KABUL – The President of Ukraine has condoled President Ashraf Ghani over loss of Afghan lives on Ukrainian plane crush in Iran.
According to the presidency, President Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine in a phone conversation expressed his profound sympathies to President Ashraf Ghani and the families of Afghan passengers who lost their lives in the Ukrainian plane crash in Tehran earlier this week.
It added president Zelensky said that it has been his priority to deploy an investigation team to Iran to establish the truth of this tragedy and once established will share it with the Afghan government.
President Ghani said he hoped that the Iranian authorities will cooperate with the investigations to establish the causes of this incident, particularly on providing the black box of the crashed airliner to the team of investigation.
He reciprocally offered his deepest condolences to the president of Ukraine over the incident that took the lives of all passengers from various nationalities on board. President Ghani asked his Ukrainian counterpart to convey the Afghan government’s sympathies to the families of deceased and the State Aviation Administration of Ukraine.
Ukraine's foreign ministry confirmed that everyone aboard the Boeing 737-800 flown by Ukraine International Airlines was killed after it came down shortly after it departed from Imam Khomeini International Airport in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
Initially, Ukraine's embassy in Iran said on Wednesday morning that engine failure caused the plane to crash and denied that it was terror-related or that a rocket had hit the aircraft. But, it later withdrew this statement, saying that anything was possible, and Mr Zelensky instructed Ukraine's prosecutors to open criminal proceedings over the crash. The timing of the crash has led to speculation it could have been linked to the offensive that saw rockets from Iran striking US targets overnight, hitting two Iraqi airbases where American and coalition forces are based. (SW)