Iran Shot Down a Plane Carrying 85 Canadians, and Now Strikes Canadian Forces and Civilian Targets in the Gulf. What Does Canada Call That, If Not State Terrorism?

Op-Ed: Javad Zarif’s recorded words, citing the plausibility of an intentional airline strike, are in Ottawa’s hands, and he is now posting about Western ‘war crimes’.

OTTAWA – On the night of January 8, 2020, a Boeing 737 carrying 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents climbed out of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and was destroyed by two missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One hundred and seventy-six people died. Iran denied it for three days, bulldozed the crash site, and then blamed a single soldier’s misidentification error.

Canada accepted that framing, more or less. It still does.

This week, Mohammad Javad Zarif — Iran’s former foreign minister, now a prominent public advocate for Tehran’s position in its war with the United States and its allies — posted publicly that Western military action constitutes a war crime involving the deliberate killing of civilians.

The statement drew wide attention. It drew no attention to the fact that Zarif is the same official who, in a secretly recorded conversation obtained and studied by Canadian security agencies in the months after PS752 was destroyed, privately acknowledged that an organized, intentional attack on that civilian aircraft was “not at all unlikely” — and that the truth would never be revealed because doing so would expose the inner workings of Iran’s defense systems.

That tape should not be treated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and CSIS as a mere artefact of history. Recent events have only strengthened the case against Iran.

In late 2021, the victims’ families released a fact-finding report arguing that Iran deliberately kept its airspace open after launching attacks on American targets, likely exposing civilian passengers to possible retaliation while senior officials managed the consequences behind a false “human error” narrative. The families said they pursued their own investigation because official channels — including Canada’s — had failed to deliver accountability.

Six years later, something has changed — not in Tehran, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ contempt for civilian lives has never wavered, but in the wider geopolitical frame, which makes the original accident narrative harder than ever to sustain.

In early March 2026, Iranian missiles struck Camp Canada at Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, damaging bunkers where about 200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel were sheltering. Iran also launched missiles at non-combatant nations in the region, suggesting an asymmetric strategy aimed at dividing the US-led campaign from potential allied supporters.

Russia feeds Iran targeting data for such strikes.

The Carney government sat on the Canadian base strike story for eleven days, until a French-language newspaper in Montreal broke it. Conservative defense critic James Bezan called the silence shameful.

Zarif is now proposing diplomacy in Foreign Affairs.

But Gulf officials note that his framework omits the terroristic conduct at issue —Iran’s attacks on its neighbors. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, said Zarif’s proposal ignores “one of the core flaws in Iran’s strategy: aggression against its Gulf Arab neighbors,” including “thousands of missiles and drones targeting infrastructure, civilians, even mediators.”

The events — a destroyed civilian airliner in 2020, a targeted Canadian military base in 2026, and broader assaults on civilian targets in Gulf states — increasingly appear to be tied by doctrine: targeting civilians and vulnerable states to weaken Western resolve against the murderous Iranian regime and its allies, such as Russia, which uses similar tactics.

Russia, which provided intelligence to Iran during the current conflict including real-time data on the locations of American warships and aircraft — enabling more precise strikes against allied forces — has its own entry in the ledger of civilian aircraft destroyed in the name of military convenience.

On July 17, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian Buk missile system. All 298 people aboard were killed.

In May 2025, the International Civil Aviation Organization found Russia responsible under international law, ruling it had failed to uphold its obligations prohibiting the use of weapons against civil aircraft — the first such ruling in the organization’s history.

A Dutch court had already convicted two Russian nationals of murder in absentia, and investigators found strong indications that Vladimir Putin personally authorized delivery of the Buk launcher. No one has served a day in prison.

The parallels with PS752 are exact: a surface-to-air missile, a civilian aircraft in a known corridor, official denial followed by an implausible accident narrative, destruction of evidence, obstruction of international investigators, sham prosecutions, and zero accountability.

These are not coincidences. Which returns us to Zarif and his recording.

In the months after PS752 was destroyed, Zarif held a private conversation that was recorded and eventually passed to Canadian security agencies. He was at the time Iran’s primary negotiator with the countries that lost citizens on the flight and the Islamic Republic’s principal voice on the global stage.

On the recording, he is heard working through what may have happened that January night with a candor he never showed in public.

He raises the possibility that two or three “infiltrators” inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could have carried out an organized, intentional act — and says that scenario is “not at all unlikely.”

“They won’t tell us, nor anyone else,” he says in Farsi, “because if they do it will open some doors into the defence systems of the country that will not be in the interest of the nation to publicly say.”

And then he invokes Russia. He points to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as the model: how Russia was accused of shooting down a civilian aircraft but simply never admitted it, managed the international response, and moved on. That recording has been in the possession of Canada’s security agencies since at least November 2020. No public accounting of what they concluded from it has ever been released.

The technical case against Iran’s accident narrative has been devastating on its own terms for years.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard, in a 45-page letter to the Iranian government, found the official explanations riddled with inconsistencies that “seem contrived to mislead and bewilder.” She noted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps failed to follow standard procedures — monitoring altitude, climb rate, airspeed, and target size — that would have identified the aircraft as civilian. An Ontario Superior Court found in 2021, on the balance of probabilities, that the shoot-down was an intentional act of terrorism.

Canada’s own forensic examination, released that same year, did not find evidence of premeditation and assigned responsibility through the language of recklessness and wanton disregard. Ottawa’s verdict appears to be the strongest official counterweight to the intentionality thesis.

That decision sits at the center of an institutional contradiction.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s 2021 report had already confirmed it was investigating credible reports that Canada-based relatives of the PS752 victims were being harassed and intimidated by threat actors linked to Iranian proxies. But the RCMP has simultaneously maintained there is no basis for a domestic criminal investigation into the killing itself.

Andy Brooke, a retired RCMP officer with counterterrorism experience, has been assisting victim families as part of the Coalition for Criminal Accountability for Flight PS752.

He says he reviewed the force’s own submissions to the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency and concluded that the Criminal Code of Canada supports a domestic investigation and prosecution of the PS752 downing — and that the government has been maneuvering toward civil settlement and reparations while deliberately avoiding criminal accountability. What he says he found in the force’s own internal framing was a logical contradiction he considered indefensible: the RCMP’s documents characterize the downing as a criminal act while simultaneously insisting it was not intentional.

A formal complaint against then RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki was filed with the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission on August 31, 2021, and referred to the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency sixteen days later. After months without public action, a Federal Court application for judicial review was filed in January 2023 in an effort to compel the agency to act. The complaint has now been before the agency for more than four and a half years. “For the families of Flight PS752 and for all Canadians,” Brooke wrote in 2023, “the legacy of Commissioner Lucki has been etched as the only Commissioner in RCMP history who refused to open a Canadian criminal investigation into the murder of 55 Canadian citizens, contrary to the provisions of the Criminal Code which she swore to uphold.”

If the agency recommends opening a domestic criminal investigation, it could compel RCMP action, enable prosecutions of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figures under Canadian law, and strengthen the parallel International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court cases. If it upholds the RCMP’s position it will confirm what the families have suspected for six years: that the decision to pursue civil reparations rather than criminal accountability was made at a political level, and the force was the Liberal government’s instrument.