Underlying these passions is a deeply-rooted impetus for accountability that has informed the century-plus long struggle for representative government within Iran from the start. Cover-ups are part of the Islamic Republic’s DNA, and those officials who have gone public about the regime’s persistent use of violence against its own population or perversion of its own institutions have typically been detained and silenced.

The rapid admission of official responsibility for the downing of Flight 752 is a rare exception. As the Iranian American human-rights lawyer Gissou Nia has explained, many Iranians are convinced that the tragedy would have been played very differently had the plane crash been purely a domestic affair. By contrast, a crash involving passengers of diverse nationalities, on an American-branded plane flown by a Ukrainian airline to a Canadian destination, involved the global community in the incident and forced Iran’s military to own up to its grievous error.

Even still, Tehran does not yet seem inclined to hold its own commanders accountable. To date, the only apparent judicial actions related to the missile strike on the Ukrainian plane have been directed at those who helped to make the truth known to the world. Iran has reportedly arrested the person who leaked the video that helped open-source investigative journalists confirm the suspicions voiced initially by Canadian and American officials about the crash.

Ultimately, there is little reason to believe that the public admission of fault by the Iranian military in the downing of the plane will lead to any kind of meaningful accountability from the ruling system itself. Iran’s security establishment is already dealing with the shock of losing one of its most influential figures in Soleimani. Moreover, it’s hardly obvious that responsibility for wrongfully shooting down Flight 752 should end with the military. After all, the Iranian media made a point to tout the role Khamenei himself played in overseeing the missile attack from a military operations center. His government’s official indifference toward the lives and well-being of Iranians contrasts starkly with the apparent precision and deliberation demonstrated by the Iranian military in avoiding American fatalities in Iraq and elsewhere.

Real accountability for Flight 752 may have to come from the demonstrators whom Khamenei’s government is trying hard to banish. By the fifth day, their numbers had been thinned by a muscular police presence as well as the tear gas and episodic gunfire that has been deployed over the past few days. But whatever becomes of this latest unrest, it will not be the end of the challenges facing the Iranian leadership from its own citizenry.

Grief and anger over the plane downing appear to have engaged a different constituency than those who rallied in November and in previous rounds of unrest over concerns about economic hardship and inequality. Then, the protesters were primarily poor young men, enraged and desperate about their lack of opportunities and the corruption that insulates the regime and its oligarchs from any consequences.