A map shows where the flight was shot down. Photo / Supplied
The message from Iran's president was strong, if at first a little cryptic.
As tension with the United States ramped up earlier this month, Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani fired off a pointed tweet.
"Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290," he wrote, along with the hashtag #IR655.
"Never threaten the Iranian nation."
The January 7 tweet appeared to be in response to US President Donald Trump's earlier threat to target 52 Iranian sites — one for each of the 52 Americans held during the infamous 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran.
In turn, Mr Rouhani referenced the number 290, invoking the memory of the 290 passengers and crew who died on Iran Air flight IR655, which was accidentally shot down by a US warship in 1988.
In a chilling twist, two days after Mr Rouhani's tweet, a Ukrainian International Airlines flight crashed in Iran with no survivors. Iran has said it shot down the plane by accident.
For many in Iran, the Ukrainian plane tragedy would have felt painfully familiar. Because while the rest of the world may have moved on from it, the Iranian people have never forgotten what happened to IR655 and the 290 ill-fated souls on board.
WHAT HAPPENED TO IR655
The IR655 tragedy played out in the final throes of the Iran-Iraq War.
The US, an ally to Iraq, had warships in the Persian Gulf to protect oil routes from Iranian attack. On July 3, 1988, the US Navy cruiser USS Vincennes was among them.
Just after 10am, the USS Vincennes and another US ship were caught in a skirmish with Iranian patrol vessels.
Meanwhile, at the very nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport in Iran, flight IR655 was running behind schedule.
The Airbus A300, which had 290 passengers and crew on board, was scheduled to leave Bandar Abbas for Dubai at 9.50am but was delayed. Veteran pilot Captain Mohsen Rezaian finally got the plane off the ground at 10.17am.
Given the short distance to Dubai — which was a mere 28 minutes across the Persian Gulf — the plane just needed to climb to 14,000 feet, cruise for a short while over the water and descend into Dubai.
The captain turned on the plane's transponder — a device that receives and transmits signals about the aircraft's identification and location — and the plane began its journey across the chaotic waters of the Persian Gulf.
Below, crew on the USS Vincennes — still exchanging fire with Iranian gunboats — spotted the Iran Air plane.
They mistook it for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat preparing for attack. Possibly compounding the confusion was the fact Bandar Abbas International Airport was not only a civilian transport hub, but was also being used by the Iranian military.
The USS Vincennes tried to radio contact the Iran Air plane many times — both on the military frequency, and the civilian frequency — but got no response.
The plane was declared hostile.
At 10.24am, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles. One of them struck the Airbus A300, which immediately blew apart and crashed into the water.
There were no survivors. The vast majority of people on board were Iranian, along with some passengers from the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Italy and Yugoslavia. There were 66 children among those on board. The black boxes were never found.
In Iran, the downing of IR655 was a source both of nationwide heartbreak and intense fury. Tehran called the incident a "barbaric massacre" and took at as a signal of American aggression.
Then-US President Ronald Reagan expressed regret for the loss of life but defended the USS Vincennes captain's actions in defending his ship and crew.
A report by the Pentagon said human error was behind the tragedy, with the ship's crew having mistaken the commercial A300 for a hostile fighter jet. This was despite the Iranian airliner having been flying in approved commercial airway, and identifying itself to air traffic control as a civilian plane.
The Pentagon report threw some blame on Iran for allowing a passenger plane to fly low in an active conflict zone.
But the feeling in Iran was the plane was downed on purpose.
"The shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 was an accident, but that is not how it was seen in Tehran," former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack wrote in his 2004 book The Persian Puzzle, The Washington Postreported.
"The Iranian government assumed that the attack had been purposeful … Tehran convinced itself that Washington was trying to signal that the United States had decided to openly enter the war on Iraq's side."
After Iran sued the US in the International Court of Justice over the incident, the US government paid $US62 million to the families of those on board flight IR655.
Iran is now being pressured to similarly compensate victims of those who died in the downing of the Ukrainian International Airlines plane this month.
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