What the HELL were they doing in that air space???
It was a commercial flight. 8 million tourists visited Iran last year. Supposedly there are interesting sights to see. Canadians were the largest group of foreigners on that flight.
Keep in mind there were thousands of Iranians that left Iran in 1979 and moved to other places in the world like the US, Canada and every other free country that would take them in. Many of these Canadians on this flight MAY have relatives that still live in Iran. Some could even be Iranian by birth and now Canadian citizens.
There are millions of people that left the middle east in the 1970s to escape the Islamic revolution. Many were Christians that left with their cloths and anything else they could carry.
For example, I met a bartender in Innsbruck Austria in 1990. He spoke better English than I did. I asked where he was from and he stated Lebanon. His family owned large amounts of olive groves in that country. I think he was or had been fairly wealthy at one point in time. He said it was not safe for him to live in the country of his birth anymore. He said Lebanon was a beautiful place. A true garden of Eden. If you recall, back in the 1960s and 1970s Beirut had been a great vacation spot for people from Europe. It was like the Las Vegas of the Med. That all changed in the late 1970s.