Thanks for that link, gearlever. I had not seen this level of detail yet in terms of public utterances.
A senior IRGC commander, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, confessed publicly that he knew the plane had been shot down almost immediately, and asked for forgiveness. {snip}
A missile operator acting alone because of a “communications breakdown” had mistaken the Boeing 737 for a cruise missile heading towards a sensitive IRGC site, and only had 10 seconds to decide whether to fire, he said. “He was obliged to make contact and get verification. But apparently, his communications system had some disruptions. Either the ‘jamming’ system was the cause or the network was busy,” he said.
Given the time of day this happened, one wonders if this operator had just taken over from the previous shift/watch, or had been up all night and was near the end of the shift? That kind of detail may not be made public, but might inform some of the human factors involved.