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.
UKRAINE, NVIDIA: The US leader said the subject of Russia’s war had come up ‘very strongly,’ while Jenson Huang was hoping that the conversation was good Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and US President Donald Trump had differing takes following their meeting in Busan, South Korea, yesterday. Xi said that the two sides should complete follow-up work as soon as possible to deliver tangible results that would provide “peace of mind” to China, the US and the rest of the world, while Trump hailed the “great success” of the talks. The two discussed trade, including a deal to reduce tariffs slapped on China for its role in the fentanyl trade, as well as cooperation in ending the war in Ukraine, among other issues, but they did not mention
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi yesterday lavished US President Donald Trump with praise and vows of a “golden age” of ties on his visit to Tokyo, before inking a deal with Washington aimed at securing critical minerals. Takaichi — Japan’s first female prime minister — pulled out all the stops for Trump in her opening test on the international stage and even announced that she would nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, the White House said. Trump has become increasingly focused on the Nobel since his return to power in January and claims to have ended several conflicts around the world,
GLOBAL PROJECT: Underseas cables ‘are the nervous system of democratic connectivity,’ which is under stress, Member of the European Parliament Rihards Kols said The government yesterday launched an initiative to promote global cooperation on improved security of undersea cables, following reported disruptions of such cables near Taiwan and around the world. The Management Initiative on International Undersea Cables aims to “bring together stakeholders, align standards, promote best practices and turn shared concerns into beneficial cooperation,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said at a seminar in Taipei. The project would be known as “RISK,” an acronym for risk mitigation, information sharing, systemic reform and knowledge building, he said at the seminar, titled “Taiwan-Europe Subsea Cable Security Cooperation Forum.” Taiwan sits at a vital junction on
LONG-HELD POSITION: Washington has repeatedly and clearly reiterated its support for Taiwan and its long-term policy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday said that Taiwan should not be concerned about being used as a bargaining chip in the ongoing US-China trade talks. “I don’t think you’re going to see some trade deal where, if what people are worried about is, we’re going to get some trade deal or we’re going to get favorable treatment on trade in exchange for walking away from Taiwan,” Rubio told reporters aboard his airplane traveling between Israel and Qatar en route to Asia. “No one is contemplating that,” Reuters quoted Rubio as saying. A US Treasury spokesman yesterday told reporters
RSS