People pay tribute to the victims of the doomed Ukrainian plane.

The scene of the plane crash in Iran.

A leaked recording of an Iranian pilot talking to an air traffic controller in Tehran shows the Islamic Republic knew immediately it had shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing all 176 people aboard – despite denying it for days, according to reports.

A transcript of the recording, published by Ukrainian 1+1 TV, contains a conversation in Farsi between a controller and a pilot flying a jet for Iran’s Aseman Airlines from the southern city of Shiraz to Tehran on Jan. 8.

“A series of lights like … yes, it is a missile, is there something?” the pilot calls out to the controller.

“No, how many miles? Where?” the controller asks. “What is the light like?”

The pilot responds that he saw the light by the Payam airport, near where the Revolutionary Guard’s Russian-made Tor M1 anti-aircraft missile was launched at Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which crashed eight minutes after takeoff from Tehran en route to Kyiv.

The controller says nothing has been reported to them, but the pilot insists: “It is the light of a missile.”

“Don’t you see anything anymore?” the controller asks.

“Dear engineer, it was an explosion. We saw a very big light there, I don’t really know what it was,” the pilot responds.

The controller then tries in vain to contact the doomed Ukrainian Boeing 737.

Publicly accessible flight-tracking radar information suggests Aseman Airlines Flight 3768 was close enough to Tehran to see the blast.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said after the release of the recording that it “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane was hit by a missile.”

“Everything is audible there,” Zelensky told 1+1. “Everything is recorded.”

He added: “He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying’, he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there.”

Hassan Rezaifar, the head of the Iranian investigation team, acknowledged Monday that the recording was legitimate and said it was handed over to Ukrainian officials.

But he condemned the publication of the recording as “unprofessional,” saying it was part of a confidential report.

“This action by the Ukrainians makes us not want to give them any more evidence,” said Rezaifar, according to a report by the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

On Monday, Ukrainian investigators were to travel to Tehran to participate in the decoding of the voice and flight data recorders, but Zelensky insisted on bringing the black boxes back to Kyiv.

“It is very important for us,” he said.

Ukraine International Airlines said in a statement that the recording provided “yet more proof that the UIA airplane was shot down with a missile,” according to Reuters.

“There were no restrictions or warnings from dispatchers of any risk to flights of civilian aircraft in the vicinity of the airport,” it added.

It was unclear how the TV station obtained the recording, but officials denied it had come from the Ukrainian authorities.

“This is a journalistic investigation. You need to ask them where they got this recording,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council, told Agence France-Presse.

The shootdown came just hours after Iran launched ballistic missiles at two bases housing US troops in Iraq in response to President Trump’s order to kill Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.

Tehran at first vehemently denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the plane’s engine malfunctioned, but later took responsibility in the face of mounting evidence.

With Post wires