MH17 ‘shot down by pro-Russian rebels’
THE HAGUE: The final report of the investigation into the crash of flight MH17, shot down while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, is expected to be published in the first half of October, the Dutch Safety Board said yesterday.
The board refused to comment on CNN reports saying that the investigation pinned the downing of MH17 on “pro-Russian rebels”.
“We follow the rules from the International Civil Avia- tion Organisation (ICAO) when it comes to the investigation,” said a spokeswoman of the Dutch Safety Board (OW) in a telephone interview with the Xinhua News Agency.
The Netherlands is leading the international investigation into the crash with accredited representatives from Australia, Malaysia, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Britain and the US.
As the draft final report is confidential, the OW would not respond to questions regarding it’s contents. However, on Wednesday, CNN cited sources who had seen the draft report that “evidence points to pro-Russian rebels as being responsible for shooting down MH17”.
According to the sources cited by CNN, the report states a Buk missile (a Russian surface-to-air missile) had been launched from a village in rebel-controlled territory.
The report is also said to pin some blame on Malaysia Airlines because it did not review other countries’ warnings and was apparently unaware of conflict zones that other airlines were avoiding.
A total of 298 people, 196 of them Dutch, were killed after the commercial passenger plane crashed in the Donetsk area of east Ukraine.
A first report last September said the plane had broken up in the air “probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside”.