If you talk to experts, this cannot be right. Totally it is wrong, 100 per cent.

— FARHAD PARVARESH, TEHRAN’S AMBASSADOR FOR INTERNATIONAL AIR TRAVEL, ON REPORTS AN IRANIAN MISSILE BROUGHT DOWN FLIGHT 752.

It’s simply not possible that Iran even accidentally shot down a Ukrainian airliner that crashed with more than 60 Canadians on board, Tehran’s ambassador for international air travel said Thursday.

Suggestions that a surface-to-air missile — intentionally or not — hit the aircraft shortly after it took off early Wednesday are likely motivated by politics — not hard evidence, Farhad Parvaresh told National Post.

Parvaresh is Iran’s permanent representative to the Montreal- based International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency.

“If you talk to experts, this cannot be right. Totally it is wrong, 100 per cent,” he said of the missile theory. “This is something purely technical. It was a disaster, it was a great tragedy ... What is going around is because of some political issues, the tension between Iran and the U.S.”

Parvaresh’s comments clashed with those of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who stated definitively earlier in the day that a missile had brought down the Ukraine International Airlines flight.

Trudeau cited reports from Canadian and allied intelligence agencies and said he and the families of victims “want answers.” The prime minister reported earlier that 138 of the incident’s 176 victims were headed to Canada, through Kyiv.

Parvaresh’s remarks suggest Iran plans to stand by — for now at least — its initial insistence that the crash was due to technical problems.

But the aviation diplomat also noted the investigation is still in its early stages, and said Iran is willing to issue visas to any Canadian officials who want to take part in the probe.

He discounted the anti-aircraft missile possibility chiefly because of witness accounts and amateur video that suggested the plane descended rapidly, trailing flames, then struck the ground in a huge fireball.

“If the aircraft had been hit with a missile, it would explode in the air. It would not hit the ground, you know,” said Parvaresh. “So many pilots and engineers were interviewed in Iran. Retired pilots, experts with 30, 35 years of experience, and engineers, and all of them say that this cannot technically happen.”

He also noted doomed flight PS752 was hardly alone, with planes taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport every 10 minutes in the morning, making it even less likely it would become an anti-aircraft target.

Plus, more than 80 of the victims were Iranian citizens. “It was a disaster for the Iranian people as well, and the Iranian community in Canada.”

Parvaresh said that Iran had already invited officials from Canada and other countries with links to the disaster to participate in the investigation. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board told Tehran it has appointed an expert to the inquiry, he said, and Iran will admit any investigators who want to participate on the ground.

Even the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board was invited — because the Boeing 737-800 is American-made — and has accepted the invitation, he said.

As for the black boxes — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — data from those will be made available to any of the affected countries, said Parvaresh. If Iran does not have the technical capacity to download the information, it will end the devices to a country that has that expertise, he said.