Dehqan said on Wednesday Iranian officials are following up on the case at the international level to prove the “bitter and tragic” incident was accidental. 

He added that they’ve made contact with the families of the victims and paid compensation to some of them, but noted that Iran’s enemies are trying to exploit the incident for vested interest.

“No sane human would judge that we deliberately caused the plane to crash. But adversaries are misusing the issue as they bear grudge against Iran”, the official underscored, while pointing to a statement by the International Civil Aviation Organization that described the incident as unintentional.

The vice president noted that the Iranian judiciary's verdicts against ten military personnel earlier this week will make it difficult for some countries to politicize the human tragedy.

On Sunday, a court in Tehran convicted as many as 10 Iranian military staff for their involvement in the misfiring at a Ukrainian passenger airplane in the skies over the capital in January 2020. The court announced it has found 10 people guilty in the fatal incident, with the main defendant being sentenced to 13 years in prison while nine others received terms of one to three years.

The prime suspect is a defense system commander who “mistook” Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 for a cruise missile and shot the plane twice in contravention of to the order of the commanding center.

The commander's action in leading the downing of the plane "was due to his ignorance of the situation and his misplaced belief that the discovered target was hostile".

The other persons who have been found guilty by the court are the personnel of the Iranian Army’s air defense post.

The verdict was issued after more than three years and a total of 20 trial hearings in a lengthy judicial process in which 117 plaintiffs filed their lawsuits, 55 of the plaintiffs spoke and read out their complaints in the court sessions, and 20 lawyers represented the plaintiffs and presented their complaints and relevant evidence.

The verdict issued in the case is preliminary and can be appealed within 20 days.

The Mizan news agency of Iran's Judiciary announced that examining this case has been one of the most important, sensitive and complex judicial processes in the last few years of the country.

The website confirmed that for each victim of the tragic incident, a sum of 150,000 dollars or its equivalent in Euros has been considered as reparations, which is independent of judicial proceedings and will be awarded to their families.

On Tuesday, a coordination group representing Canada, Sweden, the UK and Ukraine announced in a statement that the court trials lacked impartiality and transparency.

A Boeing 737 plane carrying 180 passengers and crew, mostly Iranians, crashed shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran on January 8, 2020, leaving no survivors. The tragic incident happened shortly after Iran launched a barrage of missiles at the Ein Al-Assad Airbase in Iraq that hosted American soldiers back then in retaliation for the US assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani.

The General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces announced in a statement on January 11, 2020 that the airplane was shot down as a hostile object due to human error at a time of heightened US threats of war.