Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk missile, the Dutch Safety Board said yesterday in its final report on the crash on July 17 last year that killed all 298 people on board.
The long-awaited findings of the board, which was not empowered to address questions of responsibility, did not specify who launched the missile.
“A 9n314m warhead detonated outside the aeroplane to the left side of the cockpit. This fits the kind of warhead installed in the Buk surface-to-air missile system,” safety board head Tjibbe Joustra said, presenting the report.
Photo: AFP
Russia had disputed the type of missile used, he added.
At a meeting earlier yesterday with victims’ families, Joustra said passengers who were not killed by the impact of the missile would have been rendered unconscious by the sudden decompression of the aircraft and a lack of oxygen at 33,000 feet (10,000m).
Joustra was speaking at the Gilze-Rijen military base, where the flight cabin and business class section of the Boeing 777 have been assembled painstakingly from wreckage brought back from Ukraine.
The board also found that Ukraine had reason to close airspace over the conflict zone, and that the 61 airlines that had continued flying there should have recognized the potential danger.
It recommended international aviation rules be changed to force operators to be more transparent about their choice of routes.
The missile’s Russian maker presented its own report hours earlier, trying to clear Russia-backed separatists who controlled the area, or Russia, of any involvement in the crash.
The Dutch investigators said the missile exploded less than 1m from the MH17 cockpit, killing three crew members in the cockpit and breaking off the front of the plane. The aircraft broke up in the air and crashed over a large area controlled by rebel separatists who had been fighting government troops there since April last year.
The investigators unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of the forward section of MH17. Some of the nose, cockpit and business class of the Boeing 777 were rebuilt from fragments of the aircraft recovered from the crash scene and flown to Gilze-Rijen air base in southern Netherlands.
The Russian state-controlled Almaz-Antey arms-maker contended said a draft of the Dutch report found the plane was shot down by a Buk missile warhead, but that it conducted two experiments — in one of which a Buk missile was detonated near the nose of an airplane similar to a 777 — that contradict that conclusion.
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