A partial-reconstruction of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, shot down in July 2014 over eastern Ukraine with the deaths of all 298 on board, was unveiled on Tuesday as the Dutch safety board published its report into the crash.
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Despite the discovery, the Dutch Safety Board has yet to determine who is personally responsible for firing the missile.
Detailed examination of the wreckage and parts of a missile determined that the warhead exploded just outside the front of the plane, blasting fragments into the cockpit. Russian Federation is denying this claim today, according to The Christian Science Monitor on October 13.
The DSB first presented its findings to the victims’ families and then to the media at the Gilze-Rijen military base in the Netherlands.
The Dutch Safety Board chief said the report also concluded that there was sufficient evidence to close the airspace above eastern Ukraine, “as a precaution” – a measure which the Ukrainian government failed to implement.
It recommended global aviation rules be changed to force operators to be more transparent about their choice of routes.
All 298 people on board were killed: 193 Dutch, 43 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 10 Britons, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, a Canadian and a New Zealander.
Relatives of a few of the people who died were told victims would have lost consciousness nearly immediately, the BBC reported.
Ukraine on Tuesday defended its decision not to close airspace in the east of the country where a Malaysian passenger plane was shot down, saying it was unaware that anti-aircraft weapons were being used in the area and that planes could be under threat.
This Boeing 777-200 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was taken down by a surface-to-air missile launched from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Snizhne.
To that end, Russian Federation reportedly presented an alternate theory Tuesday that “the missile must have been fired from Ukrainian-held territory, and that it was of a type that is no longer found in Russia’s arsenal”.
In its report, the Dutch Board blamed the crash on the detonation of a warhead to the left of the aircraft’s flight cabin. Buk missile shrapnel was found inside the bodies of a few of the crew members.
“Other potential causes, such as an explosion inside the plane or an air-to-air missile, have been investigated and excluded”.
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However, Almaz-Antey says it conducted two experiments – in one of which a Buk missile was detonated near the nose of an airplane similar to a 777 – that contradict that conclusion.
