MH17 investigation damning of Russians
SECRET telephone recordings provided by Ukrainian authorities were among the most damning evidence presented by the Joint Investigation Team into the downing of MH17 in July 2014.
Yesterday the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) made up of forces from Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ukraine and Malaysia released their first results of a two-year search into how the passenger plane was shot down killing all 298 people on board.
Among millions of pages of social media posts, hundreds of witness accounts and containers full of physical evidence pointing to the location of the launch site, were more than 150,000 secretly taped phone calls captured in the region in the days before and after the disaster.
These conversations, combined with the cellphone towers they bounced off provided some of the most chilling evidence from the scene.
One call between Russian separatists on July 16 – the day before the plane was shot – seems to show a request for the missile being made.
Various others provide further irrefutable evidence of the route the missile took.
One call between men codenamed Orion and Delfin has them discussing how “it has to be loaded, camouflaged” and driven away. A separate call after the plane crashed confirms: “The vehicle is in Russia”. “The vehicle is in Russia for a long time.”
The damning conversations are just some of the evidence that has taken more than two years to produce in what is the AFP’s most complex and challenging investigation.
The report confirmed the missile was launched from a patch of farmland just outside Snizhne in area controlled by Russian separatists.
It was then transported back across the border to Russia and has not been seen since.
“We have no doubt whatsoever that the conclusions we are presenting together are accurate and that conclusion is that MH17 was shot down by a Buk from farmland … (near Snizhne) and the system was brought from Russian Federation territory and returned to Russian territory afterwards,” said the Head of Holland’s Central Crime Investigation, Wilbert Paulissen.
The Russian foreign ministry slammed the findings as “biased” and “politically motivated”. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “Russia is disappointed that the situation around the investigation of the Boeing catastrophe is not changing.”
The manufacturer of Buk missiles Almaz-Antey has also hit back at the findings, saying the information they handed to the JIT was “not convenient” for the JIT.
An adviser to the chief designer, Mikhail Malyshevsky, said their experiments found a different conclusion.
“We conducted three experiments that confirm the version that the Malaysian Boeing was shot down by a missile from the direction of the village of Zaroshenskoye,” he said.