Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk 9M38M1 anti-aircraft missile from separatist-held territory on July 17, 2014, Dutch Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra told reporters on Oct. 13.
“The area was controlled by separatists at the time,” Joustra said.
Joustra saying that the Buk missile was fired from separatist-controlled territory.
Joustra presented the board’s report on the crash.
The report refutes all theories of the crash that have been presented by Russia, including the latest one by arms producer Almaz-Antei.
The
missile had a 9N314M
warhead, he said. This
version contradicts Almaz-Antei, which claims that the
missile carried an older 9N314 warhead.
According to the board’s video presentation, the Buk was launched from an area near the city of Snizhne east of the city of Torez, which corresponds to open source intelligence outfit Bellingcat’s version. This also contradicts Almaz-Antei’s version, according to which the missile was launched from the village of Zaroshchenske.
The Dutch Safety Board’s presentation of its findings.
The missile was launched
from a 320 square kilometer area, Joustra said. The plane broke up on impact scattering
debris over a 50 square kilometer area, he added.
“It cannot be ruled out that more pieces of wreckage will be found in the
future but we are certain that these would not compromise our conclusions,” he
said.
Shrapnel from Russian made BUK surface-to-air missile was
found inside the crew, and everyone lost consciousness instantly, the board
said.
There was a zero percent chance people on board felt
anything, the Dutch Safety Board said.
Joustra said almost all
airlines were flying over Ukraine because no one thought civil aircraft were at
risk. He said 160 flights travelled over eastern Ukraine after the crash.
“None of the parties involved recognized the
risk from the armed conflict on the ground,” he said.
He also said the airspace
over Ukraine should have been closed and added that Ukrainian authorities had
failed to close the airspace.
However, Ukrainian Deputy
Prime Minister Hennady Zubko argued that Ukraine had complied with standards of
the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Zubko presented Ukraine’s
report on the crash, whose findings are mostly the same as those of the Dutch
report.
The Boeing was shot down by
a Buk missile from separatist-controlled territory, according to the Ukrainian
report.
Ukrainian Deputy Foreign
Minister Olena Zerkal said that Russia could be prosecuted under terrorism
financing laws for providing weapons to Kremlin-backed separatists.
“MH17 was
shot down from Russian-occupied territory by a Russian weapon,” Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko said on Oct. 13, as cited by his spokesman
Sviatoslav Tsegolko. “The tribunal that was blocked by Russia was supposed to
name the culprits.”
Ned Price, a spokesman for
the U.S. National Security Council, said that the Dutch report was an important
milestone in holding those responsible for the crash.
“Our assessment is
unchanged – MH17 was shot by a surface-to-air missile fired from
separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine,” he said.
Barry Sweeney, whose son,
Liam, was one of the victims, told BBC about the details of the report.
“Basically that the plane
was hit be a Buk missile. I think the Russians have said it wasn’t a Buk, but
through fragments they’ve found they reckon it was,” he said. “It’s hit the
cockpit first, killing all three in the cockpit. The cockpit then broke off
probably creating confusion in the rest of the plane. Hopefully most people
were unconscious by the time this happened.”
The launch site,
according to the report. Almaz-Antey’s version here contradicts the version
presented by the same company to the public.
But who was responsible for firing that missile will
not be known until a parallel Dutch criminal investigation into the
shoot down is released in coming months. The criminal probe to identify
who is to blame for the catastrophe is being carried out by Australian,
Belgian, Malaysian, Dutch and Ukrainian investigators.
Before
the release of the Dutch report, officials at Almaz Antey, the Russian
maker of the Buk missile system, presented in Moscow the results of an
experiment they conducted as part of their own investigation into the
downing of MH17. Officials showed a short video of a Buk missile being
exploded near the nose section of an IL-86, a Soviet-era airliner
approximately the same size of the Boeing 777 aircraft used by Malaysia
Airlines to conduct Flight MH17.
According to Western media
reports, the Almaz Antey officials said that analysis of the experiment
results showed that MH17 had been hit head-on by a Buk missile, implying
that the impact direction indicates it was fired by a Ukrainian missile
battery, and not from near the town of Snizhne, as indicated by
investigation by online groups and Western media.
Instead, the
Russian investigators repeated earlier claims by the Russian Defense
Ministry and the missile maker that the weapon had been fired from the
village of Zaroshchenke, which Russia says was under Ukrainian
government control at the time of the shoot down.
Open-source
investigation team Bellingcat, which has uncovered a large amount on
evidence on the MH17 shoot down from social media posts by members of
the public and the Russian military, said in a report issued on July 13
that Zaroshchenke was “highly unlikely” to have been the launch site of
the Buk missile, although it could not rule out the possibility
entirely.
Bellingcat did, however, offer evidence that the area
indicated by the Russians as being under Ukrainian government control
was in fact almost certainly under the control of Russian-separatist
forces at the time of the shoot down.
The Dutch Safety Board was careful not to assign blame for the shoot down, leaving that function to the criminal probe.
However,
information already leaked from that investigation fits in with a vast
pool of eyewitness evidence, media reports and open-source
investigations that indicate that the plane was shot down by a Buk
missile from territory controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists near the
village of Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast.
According to evidence collected by Bellingcat, the Buk missile launcher
was transported from the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade base in the
Russian city of Kursk.
Russia has come up with many conflicting
theories that blame Ukraine for the crash, although most of the Russian
claims have already been debunked.
More than half of the
civilians killed on board MH17, 193, were from the Netherlands, while
Malaysia lost 43 citizens, and Australia 27.
Russia on July 29
vetoed a United Nations Security Council draft resolution to set up an
international tribunal into the downing of MH17, saying the move was
premature.
Eleven countries on the 15-member council voted in favor of the proposal
by Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ukraine, while
three countries abstained: China, Angola and Venezuela.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]
