Worldwide investigators concluded a 15-month probe into the tragedy last night and concluded that flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian-made BUK fired from rebel-held eastern Ukraine.
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The Dutch Safety Board said in its final report on Tuesday that the jet was brought down by a Buk missile fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
The crash in July 2014 killed all 298 people on board, most of whom were from the Netherlands.
Mikhail Malyshevsky, adviser to the general designer of Almaz-Antei, said that all evidence pointed to the conclusion that the flight was downed by a guided air defense missile, probably a 9M38M1 missile of the BUK-M1 which “has not been produced in Russian Federation since 1999”.
Ukraine and Western nations contend that the missile was launched by Russian-backed rebels, while Russia says if the plane was brought down by a missile, it must have been launched by Ukrainian government forces. He also took Ukrainian authorities to task for allowing civil aircraft to fly over eastern Ukraine during the conflict between Ukraine and the pro-Russian rebels. However, the organization was unable to specify the exact location from where the missile was launched, defining just an area of 320 square kilometers (123 square miles) in eastern Ukraine.
The safety board’s report said the surface-to air missile exploded less than a metre from the Boeing’s cockpit and broke off the front of the plane.
The head of ICAO’s Council said that they will review the report’s recommendations and respond as needed, Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.
However Russia’s state arms producer Almaz-Antey – which makes Buk missiles – criticized the Dutch report.
The Dutch Safety Board, which led the worldwide team of investigators, has stressed its mandate was not to determine who pulled the trigger, amid a separate criminal probe by Dutch prosecutors. It said its own experiments prove a much older missile took down the plane.
The board, which did not lay blame for the air disaster, said Ukraine should have closed the airspace over the conflict zone, and that the 61 airlines that had continued flying there should have recognized the potential danger. In their report they said that about 16 Ukrainian aircrafts (helicopters and planes) have already been shot down by separatists, which is why they chose to close off the airspace in eastern Ukraine.
“They showed us the fragments that were inside the plane”, Oehlers said, adding that in the room “it was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop”.
On the day of the crash, about 160 commercial flights overflew the area, the inquiry said.
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Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the report, 15 months in the making, had given “a lot of clarity” as to the cause of the disaster and that it had confirmed “some of our most shocking suspicions”.
