FMs honour Iran crash victims at Canada House

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne and his British, Ukrainian, Swedish and Afghan counterparts, lit a candle Thursday to commemorate the victims of a Ukrainian plane accidentally shot down in Iran last week, killing all 176 people on board. The ministers, which included British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vadym Prystaiko, Sweden's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ann Linde and Idrees Zaman, Acting Foreign Minister for Afghanistan, also held a meeting at Canada House to discuss the incident.

The shootdown - and subsequent days of denials by Iran that a missile had downed it - sparked days of angry protests in the country.

The current tensions between Iran and the US reached fever-pitch two weeks ago with the American drone strike in Baghdad that killed the powerful Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The general had led Iranian proxy forces abroad, including those blamed for deadly roadside bomb attacks on US troops in Iraq.

Iran retaliated with a ballistic missile strike targeting Iraqi military bases housing US forces early last Wednesday, just before an anti-aircraft battery shot down the Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport.

New video obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday purported to show Iran fired two surface-to-air missiles at the doomed aircraft.