“Thank you and have a nice day”.
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The majority of the 298 people killed one year ago when the plane was hit over eastern Ukraine were Dutch citizens.
A relative of the Australian victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 reacts during a service for the unveiling of a memorial outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, July 17, 2015.
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 head of that youth movement gave an energetic speech, saying that “the Ukrainian criminals” were responsible for downing the plane.
A preliminary report released in the Netherlands previous year said the plane had no technical problems in the seconds before it broke up in the sky after being struck an object that could have been a missile.
Most of the participants of the march in Ukraine were women and children who were escorted by Soviet military men.
Residents of the Ukrainian village where a Malaysian airliner was shot down with 298 people aboard marked the disaster’s anniversary Friday, as newly obtained video showed Russian-backed rebels rummaging through the charred plane’s wreckage soon after the crash.
Rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko, who arrived at the commemoration ceremony on crutches, accused the Ukrainian government of taking down MH17.
Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, who will attend a service in Kiev, said on Friday it was a “moral duty” to find out who was behind the downing of the plane.
“It would not have happened without participation, without a direct order from the highest political and military leadership of the neighbouring state”, said Poroshenko.
“He knew that the place where MH17 came to rest was sacred and that a piece of it should come back to Australia”, Abbott said.
And in the Dutch city of Nieuwegein later, the names of all the country’s 193 victims will be read aloud by their family members. Some kissed the bouquets before they placed them, others kissed their fingers and pressed them against the plaque.
As memorials were held today for the victims of the incident, some questioned News Corp’s timing in releasing the video.
Aljuneda summed up the feelings of relatives when she told them, “We do not know how much we love a person until we lose them”.
Its sole support for the claim that a Ukrainian jet was involved is the voice of a separatist leader announcing that he has been told by headquarters that the MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian Air Force Sukhoi and that the separatists had shot down the Ukrainian military jet.
For instance, within minutes of the aircraft being shot down there were already videos, pictures, and social media reports of the burning wreckage.
Earlier this week, the spokesman for Russia’s federal Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, said the plane was likely shot by an “air-to-air missile” that was not made in Russian Federation.
Flags on government buildings flew at half-mast in memory of the victims, of who 196 were Dutch nationals.
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Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine have asked the United Nations Security Council to establish an global criminal tribunal to prosecute those responsible for shooting down the plane.
