Top Russians DID hatch plot to down airliner, say investigators

‘Carrying out orders’

INTERCEPTED phone calls unearthed new evidence between suspects in the downing of flight MH17 and Moscow, investigators said yesterday.

The international inquiry uncovered ‘almost daily telephone contact’ between Ukrainian separatists and high-ranking Russian officials in the days before the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was brought down over Ukraine by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile.

They included calls to Vladislav Surkov, a senior official in Putin’s government, requesting military support and political guidance during the war in Ukraine. During the intercepted calls, armed separatists in Ukraine said they had co-ordinated plans with Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s FSB security service, the successors to the KGB.

In a call before the flight was downed, separatist leader, Alexander Borodai, said he was ‘carrying out orders and protecting the interests of one and only state, the Russian Federation’.

Detectives released recordings of the calls and said they raised fresh questions about Kremlin involvement in the destruction of the Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight in July 2014. All 298 passengers and crew members were killed. Ten of the dead were British. ÷ Turkish police have banned the grieving widow of British aid worker James Le Mesurier from leaving the country after his sudden death. The former Army officer’s body has been flown home to England but Emma Winberg, Swedish wife of the founder of the White Helmets volunteer rescue teams in Syria, must stay.