Russian-made missile blamed in MH17 report

The Boeing 777 was en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam when it was downed in the skies over eastern Ukraine on July 17 a year ago.

Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra said the 15-month investigation found the warhead was that used on a Buk surface-to-air missile system.

The report doesn’t say anything about who fired the missile, although it did narrow its origin down to a Russian separatist-controlled, 124-square-mile area.

Meanwhile, Almaz-Antey, the Russian manufacturer of BUK missiles, held a concurrent event contesting the Dutch findings with results from experiments it carried out itself.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-built surface-to-air missile, investigators have formally concluded.

A bitter war was raging in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces when the aircraft was downed and, amid a huge worldwide outcry, many Western experts and governments immediately blamed the rebels.

Relatives were shown an animated reconstruction of the explosion and Oehlers said investigators believed their loved ones had had no idea they were about to die. It says “nobody gave any thought” to the risk.

According to the Guardian, a Dutch official heading the investigation dismissed the attempts to divert attention from the official investigation.

The experiments also refute what it said was the Dutch version, that the missile was sacked from Snizhne, a village that was under rebel control. It also noted that Ukrainian aviation regulators admitted that arms were being in the east of Ukraine which were capable of striking passenger aircraft.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte by phone that he hoped a separate criminal inquiry would finally draw conclusions enabling an worldwide tribunal to prosecute the culprits in the coming months.

The Dutch Safety Board led the investigation on the cause of the crash and Joustra made public the long-awaited findings during a presentation at Gilze-Rijen Airbase on Tuesday.

“The DSB has extensively studied the comments provided by the Russian Federation”, Joustra reportedly said, rejecting Russia’s claims, adding that its response to Russia’s objections are spelled out in an appendix to the report. The Dutch Safety Board’s report focuses on what caused the crash and the issue of flying over areas of conflict.

He says a few family members became emotional when they were shown an animation portraying the downing of the plane.