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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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| Information | | |
Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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23Dec14
Russian popular daily publishes eyewitness report on Ukraine's role in MH17 crash
Moscow-based popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) says it has found new evidence of the Ukrainian military's involvement in the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July, which killed all the passengers and crew aboard.
A report the daily published at its website says KP journalists have found an eyewitness who told them the airliner had been brought down by a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet with the aid of an air-to-air missile.
The man, whose name the KP does not reveal, said he was at the airdrome in the township of Aviatorskoye near the southeastern city of Dnepropetrovsk on the day of the accident and he saw with his own eyes the fighter jet take off for the mission and land after it had been accomplished.
"In the second half of the day, roughly an hour before the Boeing was shot down, three fighters took off," he said. "I don't remember the time exactly. One of the jets was equipped with the missiles of that class. It was a Sukhoi-25."
"Only one fighter returned," the eyewitness said. "It was the one that had the missiles suspended below."
When a reporter asked for a clarification on whether the jet had returned with the ammunition still suspended or without it, the man said. "Without it. And the pilot looked really scared."
"The phrase he said after they had taken him out of the jet was: 'This was a different plane'."
"Later at night, an officer asked the same guy, Voloshin (the Sukhoi-25 pilot's name as given to the KP by the eyewitness - TASS), well, what's with the plane? And the answer was, the plane turned out at a wrong time and at a wrong place."
The Boeing 777 jet of Malaysia Airlines was performing flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17 with 298 passengers and crew aboard when it crashed for the yet unclear reasons over the much-troubled war-torn Donetsk region of Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities, their Western political associates and media rushed to apportion all blame for the accident to self-defence forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, alleging that the 'rebels' had ostensibly used the BUK air defence missile system.
Spokespeople for the DPR, as well as Russian officials and military experts have categorically refuted all the allegations regarding the utilization of the BUK or a possible involvement of Russian military advisers in it.
The Dutch Safety Council published a report on provisional conclusions of the investigative commission, which said the airliner had disintegrated in midair after being hit by a multitude of objects at high velocity.
The final report on the accident is to be published within twelve months following the accident.
[Source: Itar Tass, Moscow, 23Dec14]
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