Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board at the height of fighting in the Ukraine conflict.
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The joint investigation team was established by the police and the prosecutor’s offices of the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine to cooperate within the criminal investigation aiming to identify those responsible for MH17 crash and bring perpetrators to justice.
“After this summer, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) will present the first results of the criminal investigation into the crash of flight MH17”, the public prosecutor said in a statement released late Friday.
A Buk missile reference model is examined and fully dismantled.
The missile part was found amid the plane wreckage, the report says.
It was also revealed that forensic testing on the bodies of victims found traces of zirconium, (usually found only in cockpit glass) on the shrapnel shards meaning the blast came from outside.
The final report is expected later this year.
The West and Ukraine say Russian-backed rebels fired the Buk missile.
As reported earlier, the global investigators published a report on the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014.
This part of the investigation concerns the weapon used and “the exact launch site of the weapon” to bring down the Malaysia Airlines plane.
Last year, a Dutch Safety Board report concluded that MH17 was downed by a Russian-made Buk, but did not say who fired it. Board President Djibbe Joustra said at the time that the separatists were in charge of the area from which it was sacked.
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“I am confident that this missile system was delivered from the territory of the Russian Federation with a high-skilled crew – most likely a crew of well-trained officers, of course from Russian territory”, he said.
