Downed Plane Victim's Father Demands Canada Sanction IRGC

Mehrzad Zarei, the father of Arad Zarei, will embark on his symbolic 400-kilometer march on Wednesday noon local time after a press conference at his son's grave in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and will go to Ottawa to personally deliver his protest letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Criticizing a lack of justice for the victims of the incident, he intends to ask Trudeau why the government does not blacklist Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, as was stipulated by a Canadian parliament's resolution in 2018.

In May 2021, in a case -- titled Zarei et al vs Islamic Republic of Iran et al – some family members filed a civil lawsuit against Iran and senior officials they believe were to blame for the incident. The Ontario Court ruled that the downing of the plane was an intentional act of terrorism and on December 31, 2021, awarded compensation to be shared by the estates of the six victims.

Earlier this year in June, Canada's international human rights parliamentary subcommittee criticized the government's “passive” approach toward Iran’s widespread human rights abuses in a House of Commons subcommittee meeting attended by several political and human rights activists – including the spokesman of the Association of Victims' Families, Hamed Esmaeilion.

The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Only hours earlier, the IRGC had fired more than a dozen missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops in retaliation for the killing of the IRGC Qods Force Commander Ghasem Soleimani who was killed in Baghdad by a US drone strike just five days earlier.