In early 2020, lawyer Meghdad Jebelli took the drastic decision to leave Iran and seek asylum in the West.
Jebelli, whose elder brother is a key figure in the clerical regime, left his homeland just weeks after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane over the capital, Tehran.
All 176 people on board, mostly Iranians and Canadians, were killed after the Kyiv-bound plane was hit by surface-to-air missiles on January 8, 2020. Among them was Jebelli’s nephew, a 29-year-old medical student.
After three days of denials and amid growing international pressure, the IRGC admitted to shooting down the plane “unintentionally” after misidentifying it as a threat amid heightened tensions with the United States. Tehran’s delayed claim of responsibility for the shootdown sparked angry protests in Iran and increased distrust in the clerical…
