Iran's civil aviation authority confirmed two missiles were fired at a Ukrainian airliner that was brought down earlier this month, in a preliminary report posted on its website late Monday.
"Investigators... discovered that two Tor-M1 missiles... were fired at the aircraft," it said, adding an investigation was ongoing to assess the bearing their impact had on the accident.
The statement confirms a report in The New York Times which included video footage appearing to show two projectiles being fired at the airliner.
The Tor-M1 is a short-range surface-to-air missile developed by the former Soviet Union that are designed to target aircraft or cruise missiles.
The Kiev-bound Ukraine International Airlines plane was shot down in a catastrophic error shortly after takeoff from Tehran on January 8, killing all 176 people on board.
Iran had for days denied Western claims based on US intelligence reports that the Boeing 737 operating Flight PS752 had been shot down, before eventually coming clean.
The Revolutionary Guards' aerospace commander Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh accepted full responsibility, but said the missile operator who opened fire had been acting independently.
Earlier, Iran requested equipment it says it needs from US and French authorities to download information from the black boxes of the downed plane but Tehran has not yet received a positive response, the civil aviation body said.
Canada, Ukraine and other nations who had citizens on the flight have asked Iran to send the flight data and voice recorders to experts abroad for analysis.
Tehran has given mixed signals about whether they would be handed over. Canada, which had 57 citizens on the flight, has said France would the best place to send the black boxes because it was one of the few nations with the ability to read them.
Iran’s reluctance to hand over the black boxes may frustrate nations with citizens on the flight, many of whom were Iranians with dual nationality. Tehran already faces demands for compensation and a full investigation into the shooting down.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization said in its second report on the disaster that it did not have the equipment needed to download data from the model of recorders installed on the US-built Boeing 737.
The aviation body said Iran had asked for equipment from the US National Transportation Safety Board and France’s accident agency BEA but said Tehran had not received a positive response.
