Iranian administration denies spreading misinformation after the crash of a Ukrainian passenger plane near Tehran last week, PressTV reported.

The plane of Ukraine International Airlines crashed a few minutes after taking off from Tehran to Kyiv on the morning of January 8, leaving all 176 people on board killed.

Ianian officials explained the accident with technical reasons and refuted the likelihood that the plane was shot down by missiles.

However, after the investigation, the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces issued a statement on January 10 and admitted that the Ukrainian plane was shot down by missiles fired “unintentionally” due to “human error.”

Speaking at a press conference in Tehran on Monday, the administration’s spokesman Ali Rabiei said, “as a matter of fact, we did not lie. Lying means conscious and deliberate falsification of the truth. Such a thing never took place.”

Earlier, Rabiei himself ruled out any possibility that the plane was shot down by a rocket, today he said that these comments were made "based on information available to the administration at the time, which rejected the role of any missile" as the cause of the crash.

None of the administration’s officials, including President Hassan Rouhani, knew about the cause of the crash until Friday evening, when the administration was informed of the results of an investigation conducted by the General Staff of the Armed Forces, he explained.

Head of the Aerospace Division of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh explained that the responsible operator discovered that the air defense system detected an incoming cruise missile. He then “took the wrong decision” in a “ten-seconds” after a failure in the communications network prevented him from getting permission to start.

Rabiei noted that as soon as President Rouhani found out the cause of the accident, he ordered the public to be informed accordingly.

According to him, Iran should take all technical precautions to reduce the likelihood of human errors to zero.

He drew attention to the “root cause” of the tragedy, namely “the US regime’s cowardly assassination of General Soleimani that raised the specter of war over our country and [thus] imposed heavy psychological pressure on our society.”

He also noted that “the incidence of a single error” should not call into question all the sacrifices and efforts made by the country's armed forces.