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Special Features

Who Will Khamenei Blame for the Plane Crash?

January 11, 2020
Hessam Ghanatir
5 min read
Who Will Khamenei Blame for the Plane Crash?

A few hours after the Islamic Republic conceded that Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 was accidentally shot down by the Revolutionary Guards, a number of social media accounts belonging to the Guards claimed that “infiltration and sabotage” must have been behind in the tragedy.

These claims should remind us of the so-called “Chain Murders” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the killings of dissidents and intellectuals, when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other officials claimed that those charged with these crimes were “agents of Israel.” And if these same figures downplay the Flight 752 tragedy, calling it a mistake by one or more noncommissioned officers of the Revolutionary Guards, we would be reminded of the ridiculous sentencing of police agent Orujali Babrzadeh after widespread student protests and the attack on student dormitories in Tehran in 1999, when at least five students were killed, more than 200 were injured and 1,200 to 1,400 were detained.

One of these social media accounts operates under the name of “Farid Ebrahimi,” an account some believe really belongs to Nezam Mousavi, the former CEO of Fars News Agency, which is associated with the Revolutionary Guards. In December 2019, when the same Nezam Mousavi registered as a candidate for Iran’s parliament, a number of observers claimed that Mousavi was the head of an organization that coordinates talking points for a group of Revolutionary Guards members on social media.

“In the communiqué by the General Staff of the Armed Forces,” in which Iranian authorities admitted responsibility for downing the Ukrainian Airlines flight, “it was emphasized that the culprits for this accident must be identified and prosecuted, which is absolutely the right and proper thing to do,” Mousavi tweeted [Persian link] earlier today. “But shouldn’t security agencies investigate the possibility of infiltration and sabotage, especially when Americans have multilayer schemes against Iran?”

This line of reasoning has also been followed by others. “Let us go back a little,” tweeted Mohammad Padash [Persian link]. “How can a citizen, just by chance, film the exact moment when the missile strikes the Ukrainian plane, and the film finds its way to the New York Times? And the photographer behind the camera says nothing when he sees the explosion in the sky? Was he waiting for it before it happened?”

This approach is exactly how those accused of the Chain Murders were handled. The Supreme Leader accused them of being agents of Israel; interrogators then tried to prove this accusation by torturing them, and forcing them to make false confessions against themselves. Later it was revealed that interrogators had used intense physical and psychological forms of torture to force the detainees to confess that they had carried out these assassinations on behalf of the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad.

Eventually, however, the accused were released after videos of their interrogations were published and their cases were closed. But Ali Fallahian and Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, ministers of intelligence under the administrations of presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, and others named in the case, never appeared in court. In the end only Mostafa Kazemi, an employee of the Intelligence Ministry, and Mehrdad Alikhani, the ministry’s director-general, were sentenced to life in prison as the main culprits in the Chain Murders. But even they were pardoned and released [Persian link] after just a few years and later went into business.

Another model followed by the regime is the infamous case of Orujali Babrzadeh. After the attack on the dormitories of Tehran University students in 1999, following students protests, Farhad Nazari, the commander of Tehran province’s police force responsible for the attack, was acquitted. But a police draftee by the name of Orujali Babrzadeh was sentenced to 91 days in prison and a cash fine for stealing an electric razor belonging to an imprisoned student.

Last year, Iranian websites reported that Babrzadeh is now a police colonel and is the commander of Police Station 157 in Tehran province.

So a few noncommissioned officers in the Revolutionary Guards may be tried and given some form of punishment for the tragedy of Flight 752. Their trials would follow the rules of Iran’s Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces, meaning that they would be tried behind closed doors as members of the military. And the details of the cases will not be made public with the excuse that they relate to Iran’s air defense system and releasing such information would harm “national security.”

On Saturday, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Revolutionary Guards aerospace commander, took "full responsibility" for the crash of the Ukrainian plane. Hajizadeh is also one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s favorite generals and it is unlikely that, under current conditions, he will be seriously reprimanded or that any legal action will be taken against him.

In his own statement after Iran took responsibility for the crash, Ayatollah Khamenei made no mention of punishing the culprits, instead only ordering the “General Staff of the Armed Forces to pursue every case of possible negligence or error that may have been committed in this painful incident ... I ask the managers and officials in charge to do everything in their power to prevent such incidents from recurring in the future.”

It must be noted that it was Khamenei himself who, in the spring of 2019, gave responsibility [Persian link] for Tehran’s air defense system to the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force. And now that defense system has been shown to have fatal flaws.

A research paper published by the Iranian National Defense University’s Quarterly Journal of Strategic Defense Studies, published recently, 48 senior military experts listed 15 weaknesses in the Khatamolanbia Air Defense Force, responsible for defending the airspace of Tehran and Iran. One of the weaknesses specified was difficulties in identifying types of aircraft. And yet officers of the Air Defense Force have boasted about the downing of a US drone in 2019 and the deterring of flights by an American U2 spy plane in 2017.

 

Related Coverage:

Guards’ Recklessness Caused the Plane Crash, 11 January 2020

The Ukrainian Plane Crash and a Writer’s Desperate Quest for Truth, 9 January 2020

The Reformists Only Wanted to Preserve the Regime, 9 July 2019

Decoding Iran's Politics: The Chain Murders of Dissidents, 30 November 2018

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