Courtesy of Mish.
The Dutch investigation into flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine, officially concluded today. The Official Report Confirms MH17 Shot Down by Missile.
Dutch officials have confirmed that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was brought down by a missile and criticised Ukraine for not closing its airspace over its eastern regions despite the conflict, in the first official investigation findings into the crash that killed 298 people in July last year.
The year-long investigation determined that MH17 was shot down by a Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missile but did not seek to establish who fired it because this was not part of its mandate. “Flight MH17 crashed as the result of detonation of [a] warhead outside the airplane,” said Mr Joustra, who chaired the investigation.
Kiev and its western allies blame Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, while Russia has insisted it was the Ukrainian armed forces.
Earlier on Tuesday, Moscow gave its own version of events, which implicated Ukrainian troops on the frontline.
Yan Novikov, general director of the Russian state arms producer Almaz-Antey, which manufactures the Buk system, said experiments carried out by the company proved initial findings presented in June. These included evidence that the Buk M1 missile that brought down MH17 was fired not from the village of Snizhne that was controlled by pro-Russian rebels but from nearby Zaroshchenske.
There is a difference of opinion over who controlled Zaroshchenske at the time, with the Russian military claiming it was in the hands of the Ukrainian military while Kiev insists it was held by Russian-backed rebels. Mr Novikov declined to comment on who was in control when the plane crashed.
But he said tests had confirmed that the missile that brought down MH17 was an old model, the 9M38, which was first manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986 and decommissioned by the Russian army in 2011. The statement implied that the missile complex could not have come from Russia.
The Dutch Safety Board report will not directly address the issue of who was responsible for the MH17 disaster. A separate Dutch-led criminal investigation is continuing.
In July, Russia vetoed a draft resolution at the UN Security Council to set up an international tribunal into the disaster.
BUK-Type
The type of BUK cannot determine whether the rebels or the Ukrainian troops fired the missile, but it does seem to rule out Russia directly.
The Guardian provides this interesting snip from the report:
“The damage observed on the wreckage is not consistent with the damage caused by the warhead of an air-to-air missile in use in the region in amount of damage, type of damage and type of fragments. The high-energy object damage on the wreckage of flight MH17 is therefore not caused by an air-to-air missile.”
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