Two sides of the story in Malaysian flight

[pvsi]

delete

 

[waltky]

Russian Buk missile knocked MH-17 outta the sky...

Dutch probe: Buk missile downed Malaysian jet in Ukraine
Oct 13,`15 -- The missile shot skyward from war-ravaged eastern Ukraine. With deadly accuracy more than six miles up, it detonated just in front of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner, sending hundreds of jagged steel shards ripping through its aluminum skin at up to 5,600 mph and shearing the cockpit from the rest of the plane.

The two pilots and purser in the cockpit died instantly, and the Boeing 777 disintegrated and fell to earth, killing the rest of the 298 men, women and children aboard Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, Dutch investigators said Tuesday in a long-awaited report. Some of the victims may have been conscious for 60 to 90 seconds, the Dutch Safety Board said, but they probably were not fully aware of what was happening in the oxygen-starved, freezing chaos. The tornado-like airflow surging through the doomed jet as it came apart was powerful enough to tear off people's clothes and leave naked corpses amid the fields of sunflowers.

Journalists take images of part of the reconstructed forward section of the fuselage after the presentation of the Dutch Safety Board's final report into what caused Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to break up high over Eastern Ukraine last year, killing all 298 people on board, during a press conference in Gilze-Rijen, central Netherlands​

The 15-month Dutch investigation blamed a Soviet-made surface-to-air Buk missile for downing the Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight, but it did not explicitly say who had fired it. It identified an area of 320 square kilometers (120 square miles) where it said the launch must have taken place, and all of the land was in the hands of pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukrainian forces at the time of the disaster, according to daily maps of fighting released by the Ukrainian National Security Council. The Dutch Safety Board also found that the tragedy wouldn't have happened if the airspace of eastern Ukraine had been totally closed to passenger planes as fighting raged below. "Our investigation showed that all parties regarded the conflict in eastern part of Ukraine from a military perspective. Nobody gave any thought of a possible threat to civil aviation," Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra said in releasing the report at a military base in the southern Netherlands.

He spoke in front of the partially reassembled red, white and blue Malaysian jetliner, much of the left side of its mangled fuselage front riddled with shrapnel holes. Russian officials were prompt to dismiss the Dutch report, with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov calling it an obvious "attempt to make a biased conclusion, in essence to carry out a political order." Earlier Tuesday, the Buk's manufacturer presented its own report trying to clear the separatists, and Russia itself, of any involvement.

MORE

See also:

Ukraine Defends Decision Not To Close Airspace In MH17 Case
Tuesday 13th October, 2015 - Ukraine defended its decision not to close airspace in the east of the country where a Malaysian airliner was shot down last year, saying it was unaware that anti-aircraft weapons were being used in the area.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk missile, the Dutch Safety Board concluded in a report October 13 on the July 2014 disaster that killed all 298 people on board.

The Dutch report did not lay blame for the air disaster, but said Ukraine should have closed the airspace over the conflict zone, and that the 61 airlines that had continued flying there should have recognized the potential danger. "No one at this time...was even aware" of the possibility that Russian-backed rebels had obtained highly sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said, adding Ukraine authorities assumed the rebels were using "purely conventional weapons."

Hennadiy Zubko, head of Ukraine's MH17 investigation, said Ukraine followed established procedures. "All the recommendations from the [International Civil Aviation Organization] were carried out... Ukraine closed its airspace below 9,750 meters," he said.

Ukraine Defends Decision Not To Close Airspace In MH17 Case