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Malaysian Jet Over Ukraine Was Downed by ‘High-Energy Objects,’ Dutch Investigators Say | Malaysian Jet Over Ukraine Was Downed by ‘High-Energy Objects,’ Dutch Investigators Say |
(about 14 hours later) | |
BRUSSELS — Eight weeks after a Malaysia Airlines plane disintegrated over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard and triggering a frenzy of East-West finger-pointing, investigators, in their first account of the calamity on Tuesday, released evidence consistent with an attack by a surface-to-air missile but shed no clear light on who was responsible. | |
A preliminary report issued in The Hague by the Dutch Safety Board, which is leading an international effort to get to the bottom of the tragedy, gave some indirect support to assertions by the United States and Ukraine that pro-Russian rebels shot down the aircraft with an SA-11, or Buk, surface-to-air missile. | |
Its findings also debunked several theories circulated by the Russian news media and on the Internet, including reports that, moments before the disaster, the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 reported to air traffic controllers that they were being tailed by a Ukrainian military jet. | |
The release of the preliminary findings should also calm repeated questions by Russian officials and media in recent weeks about why, after an initial blaze of publicity and accusations, the fate of Flight 17 lost the West’s attention, a shift of interest they have often presented as evidence of some sort of cover up. | |
Yet so circumspect and noncommittal was the Dutch report that “everyone will find something here to support their case,” Reed Foster, a defense analyst at IHS Jane’s in London, said. “It is a very vanilla account of a very tragic event.” | |
The Dutch report was the first official accounting of an episode that escalated tensions between Moscow and Washington. Yet the preliminary findings — constrained by investigators’ limited access to the crash site, a wide swath of farmland controlled by pro-Russian rebels near the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, and also by their wariness of stepping into a political minefield — only highlighted how difficult and far away a definitive reckoning remains. | |
Bitter arguments over what happened to Flight 17 have both pained the grieving relatives of victims and clouded what is ultimately a criminal case involving the murder of 193 Dutch nationals, 43 Malaysians, 27 Australians and 35 others from nations as far-flung as Indonesia and Britain. | |
Intense fighting near the crash site kept investigators away, and for days, bodies and debris lay strewn across fields, unguarded, near the Russian border. | |
Investigators pieced together their account from the plane’s recorded flight data and cockpit voice recorders, photographs of the wreckage, air traffic control data, meteorological reports and other sources of information. | |
Tjibbe Joustra, chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, said in a telephone interview from The Hague that a final report would be issued sometime in the middle of next year and that investigators hoped to clarify “the type of object that penetrated the plane.” | |
The preliminary report’s most striking passages related to the moments just before the aircraft was hit, presenting a picture of a humdrum journey disturbed only by bad weather and clogged flight corridors. | |
The pilots’ last communication with air traffic controllers in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, according to the report, was a routine, three-second confirmation of the flight’s intended path through an aerial mile marker, or waypoint, known as an RND. “Romeo, November, Delta Malaysian, one seven,” a pilot reported. Less than a second later, the cockpit and the front fuselage of the eastbound plane were hit by a shower of “high-energy objects from outside the aircraft.” “Data from the flight data recorder and the digital cockpit voice recorder stopped at 13:20:03 hours,” the report said. “No distress messages were received from the aircraft.” | |
Nick de Larringa, the European editor of IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, said that while not providing any definitive answers, evidence presented by the Dutch strengthened a view promoted by Washington and authorities in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, that pro-Russian rebels shot down the aircraft using a Buk surface-to air-system. The Dutch report, he said, “does a lot to disprove the other theories but does nothing to disprove the Buk theory.” | |
Vladimir Chizov, Russia’s ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, said that the Dutch report shed no significant light on what had happened and said Russia, unlike the West, had stayed interested in the fate of Flight 17. “Until today, it seemed as if the whole crash was forgotten for several months by everybody except Russia — and perhaps Malaysia,” he said. “There was silence.” | |
While Washington pointed a finger at pro-Russian rebels immediately after the plane went down, Moscow blamed Ukraine, with Russian military officers reporting that the flight was being trailed at the time of the disaster by a Ukrainian Su-25 ground attack aircraft armed with R-60 air-to-air missiles. | |
A chart of air traffic in the area presented by the Dutch on Tuesday, however, indicated that what the Russians identified as a Ukrainian military plane was in fact a commercial airliner. The chart showed three commercial airliners near Flight 17 but no military aircraft. | |
Air-to-air missiles like the R-60, Mr. Larringa said, generally use infrared guidance systems and seek out heat sources like engines, which he said was inconsistent with evidence released Tuesday that the projectiles that shot down Flight 17 were concentrated around the cockpit. Buk missiles are radar-guided and home in on the body of their target. | |
Other experts, however, said the case was far from closed and noted that both surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles are typically fitted with proximity fuses that detonate just before striking a target. | |
“What the report concludes is that the plane was hit by a cloud of high-velocity particles,” said Joris Melkert, a professor of aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. “I can think of only two means of bringing a cloud of shrapnel up to an altitude of around 10 kilometers: either a surface-to-air missile or an air-to-air missile. Unfortunately, that question is still open.” | |
Mr. Joustra said that investigators had already begun to analyze metal fragments that were found in the bodies of the flight crew in the hope that these might provide some clue to the type of object that penetrated the plane. | |
“If you know the type of metal it is made from, and if it can be determined that this metal did not come from the plane, you can go a step further to ask how it came to be there,” Mr. Joustra said. | “If you know the type of metal it is made from, and if it can be determined that this metal did not come from the plane, you can go a step further to ask how it came to be there,” Mr. Joustra said. |
One thing investigators established beyond any doubt was that mechanical failure or pilot error were not factors. “A full listening of the communications among the crew members in the cockpit recorded on the cockpit voice recorder revealed no signs of any technical faults or an emergency situation,” the report said. “Neither were any warning tones heard in the cockpit that might have pointed to technical problems.” | |
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when it was shot down on July 17. | |
Conspiracy theories quickly arose. A rebel leader known as Igor Strelkov, a former Russian military intelligence officer whose real name is Igor Girkin, asserted that the plane had been carrying the corpses of passengers from another Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in March en route to Beijing and that the aircraft had been deliberately blown up over rebel-held territory as part of a Western conspiracy to implicate pro-Russian fighters. But the most widely held view, at least in the West, is that rebels shot down the jet mistaking it for a Ukrainian military plane, of which they had destroyed a number in previous days. | |
Mr. Foster said Dutch investigators had been deliberately noncommittal but predicted that, over time, “there will be a winnowing down of the options. They will eventually cross the Rubicon and say that the overwhelming evidence is that this was a surface-to-air missile.” But even then, he added, “we won’t know definitively who pressed the button.” | |