Russians dismiss MH17 report

Investigators reconstructed the front section of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777. Photo / AP

Investigators say Soviet-era missile shot down plane while Moscow accuses team of ‘biased approach’.

At 4.20pm on July 17 last year, a Buk 9M38 anti-aircraft missile exploded feet from the port side of the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing the three crew members on the flight deck instantly. For the other 290 or so other people on the plane, death was probably not so swift.

The results of a 15-month investigation led by the Dutch Safety Board into the shooting down of the passenger plane, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, were released yesterday, telling the story of the tragedy of MH17 in unprecedented detail, including the missile used, from where it was fired, and how the aircraft broke up.

While the missile's impact killed some of the crew, passengers further back on the plane were likely to have been conscious for up to 90 seconds as the plane fell to earth.

The investigators unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of the plane to the journalists and family members of victims at a conference in Gilze-Rijen in the Netherlands. Some of the nose, cockpit and business class of the Boeing 777 were rebuilt from fragments of the aircraft recovered from the crash scene.

Ukraine and Western nations have contended that the missile was fired by Russian-backed rebels, and while the report did not apportion blame, the findings indicated the plane was shot down by a Russian-built anti-aircraft missile fired from a 310sq km area south of the town of Snizhne, most of which was controlled by Moscow-backed separatists at the time. The findings also ruled out the claim that the aircraft was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet - a theory proposed by Russian defence officials and representatives of the Donetsk People's Republic, the breakaway state which controls the crash site.

Tjibbe Joustra, the Safety Board chairman, had stern words for the Ukrainian authorities, saying that they should have closed airspace over the war zone to civilian aircraft.

"There was sufficient reason for the Ukrainian authorities to close the air space above the eastern part of their country," Joustra said, adding that at least 16 Ukrainian military aircraft had been shot down in the area in the months before the MH17 disaster.

About 160 civilian aircraft passed over the area on the day MH17 was downed, the report found.

Russian officials cast doubt on the findings, releasing their own report hours before the Dutch which claimed that an older kind of warhead had been used and that it had been fired from another position to the southwest.

The state-owned missile company that provided the Russian contribution to the launch site analysis in the Dutch report attempted on Tuesday to go back on its findings, saying the Safety Board was wrong about both the type of rocket used and from where it came.

Almaz Antey, which builds Buk missiles, said it had replicated the Dutch account of the crash by using a 9N314M Buk warhead to blow up the cockpit of a decommissioned aircraft in a controlled experiment on October 7. The company said the experiment had produced butterfly-shaped holes that were not seen on MH17's wreckage, and failed to produce the kind of damage inflicted on MH17's left engine.

The company said MH17 must have been downed by a 9M38 missile, an older model that Russia says it withdrew from service in 2011, but which Ukraine is still believed to use.

The Almaz Antey claims contradict both the Dutch findings, which found butterfly-shaped fragments throughout the wreckage as well as on bodies of the victims, and the company's original finding, made in a report released in June, which said the aircraft had probably been hit by precisely those kinds of fragments.

The Safety Board's report is a strictly technical air accident investigation and does not apportion blame or criminal responsibility.

A separate criminal investigation, led by the Dutch police and including detectives from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine, is due to report next year. Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, called on Russia to co-operate fully. Dutch prosecutors have said that they expect to produce a dossier of evidence for charges of murder and possibly war crimes. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said her country wouldn't be "bullied" by Russia "in our pursuit of justice".

A Kremlin spokesman criticised the investigation for overlooking evidence provided by Almaz Antey and other Russian experts. "There is an emphasis on not noticing curious facts that have come to light following experiments," said Dmitry Peskov. "This speaks of a tendentious and biased approach."

Key findings

• A warhead launched by Buk surface-to-air missile downed flight MH17.

• Missile launched from 320sq km area in eastern Ukraine where Russian separatists were operating. No responsibility was apportioned.

• Missile hit the Boeing 777 on left side of cockpit, exploding less than 1m from cockpit and tearing off cockpit and front part of plane.

• Rest of the plane broke up in mid-air.

• Plane broke up over a 50km-wide area. Reconstruction hampered by difficulty recovering parts.

• Simulation of possible explosions brought them to conclusion.

• Fragments found in the cockpit such as aluminium and glass proved they perforated the jet from outside, also bits of explosive found on parts of cockpit, traces of paint linked to a missile carrying a warhead were also found and sounds picked up by cockpit microphones aided in deduction.

• Air space should have been restricted. On the day of the crash, 160 flights flew over the area but no one thought civil aviation was at risk.

- AAP