The Dutch Safety Board has concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed over Ukraine in July 2014, broke up after it was was hit by a Russian-made Buk missile fired from eastern Ukraine.
Dutch Safety Board (DSB) chairman Tjibbe Joustra briefed reporters Tuesday on the findings of the final report into the incident which does not say who was responsible and showed them a reconstruction of the front of the Boeing 777.
The investigators found the surface-to-air missile exploded less than a yard from the cockpit, killing three crew members. The front of the plane broke off and the aircraft came down over eastern Ukraine, where a conflict was raging between Russian-backed separatists and government forces.
Ukraine should have closed its airspace to civil aviation, Joustra said. None of the parties involved recognized the risk from the armed conflict on the ground, he said.
Western officials have long said the Boeing 777-200 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was hit by a surface-to-air missile. Russia has denied involvement in the incident on July 17, 2014, that killed all 298 people aboard.
Ukraine says the missile was launched in Snizhne, an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists. The Dutch report identified an area of 320 square kilometers from which it said the missile was launched, but did not state an exact launch site. The area was controlled by separatists at the time of the crash.
On Tuesday, the Russian state-controlled manufacturer of Buk missiles said its own investigation contradicts the Dutch report's conclusions.
Robert Latiff, a retired Air Force major general who is now a professor at the University of Notre Dame, said if separatists launched the missile, they probably lacked training in the weapons system, which includes radar and communications technology to track a planes transponder identification code. Russian troops would have been too professional and disciplined to make that kind of error, Latiff said.
The people who pulled the trigger, so to speak should have, as a matter of training, insured that the target was not a commercial aircraft by checking for this code first, Latiff said. I suspect this was not the case, and some nervous, anxious, or trigger-happy soldier was at fault.
