Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Hit By a Missle

Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine, the Dutch Safety Board said Tuesday as it presented the results of an official probe into the crash.

Location where missile was sacked at #MH17 “outside the mandate of Dutch Safety Board” chair says.

Tjibbe Joustra, the Dutch Safety Board chairman who gave the presentation, said: “Flight MH17 crashed as a result of the detonation of a warhead outside the airplane”.

The Dutch investigators said the missile exploded less than a meter (yard) from the MH17 cockpit, killing three crew in the cockpit and breaking off the front of the plane. The remainder of the 298 victims would have passed out within moments of the explosion due to explosive decompression as the airliner fell apart.

Instead they said the passenger jet seems to have been shot down from territory disputed by insurgents and Ukrainian troops, and by an outdated version of the BUK missile that is no longer in use by the Russian military.

A statement released by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team said their work depended largely on witness testimonies, which have so far been hard to find. This Boeing 777-200 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was taken down by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Snizhne. “None of the parties involved recognized the risk from the armed conflict on the ground”, he said.

Moreover, it is clear that Ukraine already had sufficient reason to close the airspace over the eastern part of Ukraine as a precaution before 17 July 2014.

Speaking at the Gilze-Rijen military base, close to Breda, Joustra said passengers who were not killed when the missile hit would have been knocked unconscious by the sudden decompression and a lack of oxygen at 33,000 feet.

However, Russian officials from the state firm Almaz-Antey, which manufactures BUK missiles, rejected the accusations that their missile caused the crash.

“The current system of responsibilities with respect to flying over conflict areas is inadequate… Wreckage from the aeroplane was distributed over various sites within an area of 50 square kilometres”, or about 31 square miles.

Joustra also hit out at the Ukrainian authorities for allowing civil aircraft to continue to fly above the eastern part of the country despite the raging conflict between Kiev’s forces and pro-Russian separatist insurgents.