Iran makes arrests in plane crash probe amid public fury
Iran's judiciary says arrests have been made in connection with the crash of a Ukrainian plane last week that Tehran blamed on a "human error" by its armed forces.
At a weekly press briefing in Tehran Jan. 14, the spokesman for Iran's judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Esmaeili, announced "several" arrests were made in connection with the crash of a Ukrainian passenger jet last Wednesday. All 176 people on board were killed.
It took Iranian authorities three days to admit that a missile battery operator "mistakenly" shot down the aircraft. At the time, the country's armed forces were in a state of high alert in anticipation of a US attack in response to a barrage of Iranian missiles on two American bases in neighboring Iraq.
