Correspondents say this matches claims that MH17 was hit by missile shrapnel.
Investigators relied on cockpit data, air traffic control and images, as the crash site in eastern Ukraine remains too dangerous to access amid fighting between government troops and rebels.
The plane was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.
All 298 people on board, most of them from the Netherlands, died when the plane came down, amid reports it was shot down by pro-Russian rebels.
Tjibbe Joustra, chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, which is conducting the investigation, said a final report would take around a year to publish. “We’re trying to make the report for the next-of-kin - very important - but also for history,” Mr Joustra said.
This report doesn’t say flight MH17 was knocked from the sky by a missile. But it pretty much rules out anything else.
There were no emergencies on board, no mechanical problems, the pilots didn’t make any mistakes.
Instead, it talks about the plane being punctured by “high-velocity objects”, which is consistent with how the BUK missile system works (that’s the system many suspect was responsible).
They don’t actually hit the target, they explode nearby and pepper it with shrapnel for maximum damage.
But all of this doesn’t answer the critical question. Who fired the missile?
Both sides in this conflict use the same weapon. To find out who made this terrible mistake, they need to determine where on the ground the missile was actually launched from. And one expert told me that they should eventually be able to work that out with a combination of radar data and evidence from the scene.
There is one very sobering fact also highlighted in this report. Three other, very large commercial airliners flew over the same area at around the same time.
Source: Nagaland Post
Post a Comment