Canada says black boxes from Iran crash should be sent to France

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday urged Iran to hand over the black boxes from last week's downed airliner to France for analysis and said the first remains of victims should soon arrive in Canada.

Trudeau told a news conference in Ottawa that France, which is at the core of Airbus skills and technologies, has one of the few laboratories capable of reading the flight and cockpit data recorders from the badly-damaged jet.

Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 crashed last week shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard, 57 of whom were Canadian.

"Iran does not have the level of technical expertise and mostly the equipment necessary to be able to analyze these damaged black boxes quickly," Trudeau said.

"There is a beginning of a consensus that ... (France) would be the right place to send those black boxes to get proper information from them in a rapid way, and that is what we are encouraging the Iranian authorities to agree to."

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held a rare face-to-face meeting with his Canadian counterpart, Francois-Philippe Champagne, on Friday in Muscat, Oman. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since 2012.

In a statement, Canada's foreign ministry said Zarif agreed on the need for "a transparent analysis of the black box data" and that the ministers "discussed the duty Iran has towards the families of the victims – including compensation."

After the meeting, Zarif wrote on Twitter that both countries' experts would continue to exchange information, adding that politicization of the tragedy must be rejected and that the focus should be on the victims' families.

In Ottawa, Trudeau said his government would provide 25,000 Canadian dollars (19,133 U.S. dollars) in immediate aid to the families of the victims, but he added that Canada expects Iran to compensate the families.

So far, no Canadian remains recovered from the crash have been repatriated. Trudeau said about 20 families of Canadian victims had requested the return of the bodies and that he expected the first to arrive in Canada in the coming days.

On Friday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered his first Friday prayers sermon in eight years, describing the downing of the plane as "a bitter tragedy that burned through our heart."