Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has demanded Russia co-operate with the criminal investigation into the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 disaster, after the Dutch Safety Board concluded the passenger jet was shot down by a Russian-made Buk missile.
The long-awaited report – which was handed to relatives of the 298 dead passengers and crew two hours before it was published – did not say who the safety board believed had fired the missile, but did confirm it was fired from territory held by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Although the board had been clear the report would not attribute blame, these findings are highly significant because they are the first time investigators have publicly endorsed the view that it was a surface-to-air missile that caused the crash, rather than, for instance, a missile fired from a Ukrainian air force jet, as Moscow has claimed.
"A 9N314M warhead detonated outside the aeroplane to the left side of the cockpit," the chairman of the safety board, Tjibbe Joustra, told reporters. "This fits the kind of warhead installed in the Buk surface-to-air missile system."
The explosion, less than a metre from the plane’s fuselage, killed the captain and two co-pilots instantly, and caused the cockpit to break away from the body of the jet, which then disintegrated in mid-air, its pieces scattered over a 50sq km stretch of Ukrainian countryside.
Forensic analysis
Mr Joustra said more forensic analysis would be needed to pinpoint the exact launch site of the missile inside an area of 320sq km, but such an operation was quite simply beyond the scope of safety board’s investigation.
In the background as Mr Joustra made his presentation was the looming reconstruction of the Boeing 777-200 jet, parts of which have been painstakingly rebuilt over the past 15 months on a metal skeleton – the points where the shrapnel ripped through clearly visible.
At a meeting with the families of the victims, Mr Joustra said passengers who were not killed by the impact of the missile would have been rendered unconscious by the sudden decompression of the aircraft and a lack of oxygen at 33,000 feet.
However, the report itself says some passengers could have been conscious after the missile hit: “It could not be ascertained at what exact moment the occupants died, but it is certain that the impact with the ground was not survivable.”
Barry Sweeney, whose son Liam was one of 10 UK-born victims, said afterwards he hoped all the passengers were killed as soon as the plane was hit. “We can’t be 100 per cent sure . . . but we’ve got to think that that was the case.”
Mr Joustra also said Ukraine should have closed the airspace below which fighting was taking place between its troops and the rebels because “well before the disaster, information was available which pointed to the fact that civilian aviation faced dangers”.
Sixty-one airlines, he said, had continued to use this air space despite the fact that two military aircraft were shot down two days before the MH17 attack.
As a result, the report recommends international aviation rules be changed to force operators to be more transparent about their choice of routes in potentially dangerous circumstances.
Conventional weapons
Ukraine defended its decision not to close its airspace. “No one at this time . . . was even aware of the presence of highly sophisticated anti-air missile capabilities,” the country’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Tuesday at the UN. “No one at the time had any kind of awareness of such a threat . . . everyone was absolutely sure it was about purely conventional weapons.”
The Dutch report was dismissed by Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, as "biased". Russian news agencies quoted him as saying: "There is an obvious attempt to draw a biased conclusion and to carry out political orders."
