One year ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot out of the sky over the war zone in eastern Ukraine, and one year later we are closer than ever to proving who is ultimately responsible for this tragic act.
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One year later, Ukrainian villagers marched to the crash site in a funeral procession commemorating the victims, joining mourners in Australia and the Netherlands, where the majority of the victims hailed from.
THE locals – almost all of them bussed in by pro-Russian separatists who control parts of eastern Ukraine – on Friday waved flags of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and carried banners accusing Kiev of killing innocent people in the ongoing battle with the rebel forces. The company said that separatist rebels filmed the scenes on site as they realized this was not a Ukrainian fighter jet, but a commercial plane.
New video of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 shows what appears to be Russian separatist fighters going through the belongings of the crash victims as the plane’s wreckage still smolders on the ground.
APPHOTO AMS110: Asmaa Aljuned, the widow of the plane’s co-pilot Ahmad Hakimi speaks during a commemoration ceremony in Nieuwegein, near the central city of Utrecht, Netherlands, Friday, July 17, 2015.
In an interview with the Times newspaper Yatsenyuk, who is now in London on a diplomatic visit, said: “Putin’s aim is to kill the Ukrainian project, just to eliminate Ukraine – I have no doubt”.
Oleksandr Chernenko, a member of parliament in President Petro Poroshenko’s Block, said: “We pay tribute to all those killed, but our main aim is to draw the world’s attention to the fact that the guilty still haven’t been punished”. It was to feature music, dance and the reading out of the names of all 298 victims.
Poroshenko on Friday reaffirmed his support for the establishment of a United Nations criminal tribunal that could prosecute those responsible for downing the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. “The Ukrainian government has also provided purported communications intercepts that it says show rebel involvement in downing the plane”.
Abbott said the footage highlights the fact the downing was an atrocity and the rebels were “deliberately shooting out of the sky what they knew was a large aircraft”.
Meanwhile, News Corps Australia exposed footage yesterday showing Russian rebels rummaging through the luggage of passengers and crew from Flight MH17.
Russian Federation denies supplying Ukraine’s eastern militias with the type of BUK missile system allegedly used in the attack.
Flags on government buildings around the country hardest hit in the disaster – 196 of the victims were Dutch nationals – were flying at half-mast throughout the day.
In Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott unveiled a plaque, set in soil that a police officer brought back from the Ukrainian field where the wreckage fell.
A criminal probe by a joint investigation team consisting of Australian, Belgian, Dutch, Malaysian and Ukrainian detectives is now underway. Plane was shot down and I am at the site.
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Britain, Malaysia, the Netherlands and others have floated the idea of a UN-backed tribunal, an idea to which veto-wielding Security Council member Russian Federation is opposed. He claims that it is impossible that the plane could have been shot down without “a direct order from the highest political and military leadership” of Russian Federation.
