Families of Flight PS752 victims say RCMP isn't doing enough to help Ukraine's criminal probe

With the two-year anniversary of the destruction of Flight PS752 coming up, the victims' families say the RCMP is not sharing evidence quickly enough with Ukraine — the only country conducting a criminal investigation into the tragedy.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired two surface-to-air missiles at the Ukraine International Airlines Flight on Jan. 8, 2020, shortly after takeoff in Tehran. All 176 people onboard died. Most had ties to Canada.

The RCMP resisted calls to open its own criminal investigation. Instead, the police force opted to assist Ukraine's efforts.

More than 120 RCMP members have been involved in the effort and have conducted 58 interviews, the RCMP told CBC News. 

But Hamed Esmaeilion, spokesperson for the association representing victims' families in Canada, says Ukraine's prosecutor's office and government have told him that "cooperation has not been great."

Esmaeilion said Ukrainian officials told him that his testimony was not shared by the RCMP.

"I have had several meetings with the RCMP and all of them were recorded, so they should have been passed to Ukraine, but they were not," he said.

Esmaeilion's nine-year-old daughter and wife were among the Canadian victims. He travelled to Ukraine in the fall and met with Ukraine's prosecutor general and government officials. Esmaeilion said the officials told him the RCMP still hasn't passed on his testimony, recorded almost a year earlier.

"It's not transparent for us and it's very bureaucratic and very slow," said Esmaeilion of the RCMP's process. 

In a letter to the victims' families, obtained by CBC News, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki conceded that the "pace" of transferring information to Ukraine has been "slow."

Lucki wrote that "complex investigations can take years." She also assured the families in the letter that an "information flow is happening" and that the RCMP provided "some evidence" to Ukraine in early July. The RCMP said it also sent information prior to that date.

"... This is a multi-jurisdictional, multilingual investigation with significant information that needs to be collected, reviewed, corroborated, analyzed and assessed for risk before it can be shared," Lucki wrote in the letter to families on July 7.

The RCMP is also investigating reports of physical threats, harassment and intimidation directed against family members. In its latest annual report, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) wrote that those acts of intimidation and threats are the work of "threat actors linked to proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

"This activity may constitute foreign interference," said the report.