Dutch-led inquest on MH17 points finger at Russia

A Dutch-led inquest has concluded that a Russian-made Buk missile shot down flight MH17 over Ukraine last year.

The missile, carrying a “9N314M-type” warhead, filed with bow-tie and cube-shaped iron objects, detonated less than one metre from the left side of the cockpit, Tjibbe Joustra i, the head of the Dutch Safety Board (DSF), told press on Tuesday (13 October).

It killed the crew instantly, and severed the cockpit from the rest of the plane, which then broke up and fell 10km from the sky.

The tail section hit the ground first. The main body of the plane landed upside down and caught fire.

The explosion killed all 283 passengers, 80 of whom were children, and 15 crew.

But Joustra, speaking to relatives of victims earlier on Tuesday at Gilze-Rijen airbase in the Netherlands, said they most likely died or lost consciousness immediately after the Buk hit.

The DSF said the Buk could have been fired from anywhere within a 320 square-km area in east Ukraine.

Joustra underlined that the inquest had no mandate to say who fired it, a question which is subject to a separate, criminal, investigation.

Open airspace

He criticised Ukraine for not closing its airspace to civil aviation despite the fact that Russia-controlled fighters had shot down 16 Ukrainian military aircrcaft, including two at altitudes of more than 6km, in the area shortly before the MH17 disaster on 17 July.

But he noted that non-closure is “normal” practice among war-torn states.

He said 160 civilian planes flew over the combat zone the same day and that three other civilian planes were close to MH17 when it was hit.

The prevailing theory among EU and US military experts is that Russia-controlled fighters fired the Russian-supplied Buk because they thought MH17 was a Ukrainian military plane.

The incident prompted EU states to impose economic sanctions on Russia.

It also prompted a Russian media campaign which disseminated different theories.

One theory was that the Ukrainian air force shot it down in a false flag operation in order to prompt Western intervention.

But the DSF probe ruled out the possibility that MH17 was hit by an air-to-air missile. It also said the plane was mechanically sound, and that damage wasn’t caused by a bomb or by a meteorite shower.

Joustra noted that Australian, British, Dutch, Malaysian, Russian, and US experts took part in the inquest.

He said the Russian specialists agreed with the main findings. But they disagreed that the warhead and missile type could be proved “with certainty”.

The Russian firm that makes Buk missiles, Almaz-Antey, which is under EU sanctions, held a separate press conference in Moscow earlier on Tuesday.

Its CEO, Yan Novikov, said its internal enquiry “completely refuted the conclusions of the Dutch commission”.

He said the type of missile was probably a 9M38M1-type Buk, which hasn’t been used by the Russian military since 2011.

He said it was fired from the town of Zaroshchenske, in east Ukraine. The town was held by Russia-controlled fighters last July. But Novikov said he “isn’t sure” who held the town or who fired the weapon.

He also claimed the timing of the Almaz-Antey press event was a “coincidence”.

But the timing prompted the DSF’s Joustra to tell press: “It's always special when people already know that they don't agree with a report that's not even published yet”.

Ukrainian theory

Moscow, on Monday, also tried to discredit the DSF.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign affairs minister, said the inquest is “weird” because it didn’t speak to Almaz-Antey and didn’t collect all the wreckage available.

Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, made similar remarks.

The comments come amid Russia’s ongoing refusal to authorise a UN-level criminal tribunal to bring the MH17 perpetrators to justice.

For his part, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, the head of the Ukrainian security service, the SBU, at the time of the MH17 disaster, put forward a new theory on Tuesday.

He said in an op-ed in Ukrainska Pravda, an online news agency, that the Russia-controlled fighters were trying to shoot down a Russian civilian plane in order to justify a full-scale Russian invasion.

He noted that the Aeroflot flight, from Cyprus, was the same model Boeing plane flying 1,500 metres above MH17 at the same time.

The DSF findings come three months before the EU sanctions on Russia are due to expire.

They also come amid a lull in fighting in east Ukraine and amid a new Russian military campaign in Syria, which has shifted media attention from the Ukraine conflict.