Dutch Safety Board blames missile for MH17 Ukraine disaster

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) has released its long-awaited report on the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in the Ukraine which killed all 298 passengers and crew on board. While there are no surprises in the findings with regard to the conclusion the plane was brought down after being hit by a surface-to-air missile, a statement issued by the Russian arms manufacturer responsible for the manufacture of the Buk missile, Almaz-Antey, was released hours before in what appears to be an attempt to discredit the Dutch board’s findings.
Presenting its findings at the Gilze-Rijen military base in the Netherlands, the Dutch Safety Board presented plane parts that had been brought back from the crash site. President of the Board, Djibbe Joustra, stated that the impact pattern could not have been caused by a meteor, an air-to-air missile or an internal explosion. On the contrary, he indicated that a warhead from a surface-to-air missile had detonated just above the left-hand side of the cockpit, damaging the plane’s structure.
The report went further to identify that the weapon used was a 9N314M-model warhead which was being carried on a 9M38M1 missile, as would be installed on the Buk surface-to-air missile system. While the report’s sole objective was not to apportion blame but report its only conclusions as to why the plane crashed, it did make it clear that it was believed the missile was launched from an area in the Ukraine which, at that time, was under the control of pro-Russian rebels.
The report was able to identify the warhead as a 9N314M model as the type of fragments found in the wreckage and bodies of crew members in the cockpit were bow-tie or cube shaped, found only in the 9N314M warhead. However the Russian government were quick to state that only the older type 9M38 missiles had the butterfly or bow tie shrapnel warheads and while these had been phased out by the Russian army, but that they were still being used by Ukrainian forces.
Russian state arms maker Almaz-Antey, who produce the Buk missile system, invited hundreds of journalists to an industrial park on the outskirts of Moscow on Tuesday, just hours prior to Dutch authorities releasing their final report on the crash. They revealed that specialists had blasted the cockpit of an Ilyushin 86 aircraft with a Buk missile in a Russian field. “The results of the experiment completely refuted the conclusions of the Dutch commission on the type of missile and the place of its launch,” said Almaz-Antey Chief Executive Jan Novikov.
The report also questioned the situation that the airspace in question had remained open, indicating that the Ukraine had reported that at least 16 of its forces’ helicopters and planes had been shot down between April and July that year. However “During the period in which the conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine expanded into the airspace, neither Ukraine nor other states or international organizations issued any specific security warnings to civil aviation about the airspace above the eastern part of Ukraine,” they stated.