There is an ‘extremely large amount of material’ which
suggests flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by accident, the leader
of the team investigating the incident has told the NRC.
Fred Westerbeke, who
heads the international team which is carrying out the criminal investigation
into the attack, says it is still too early to draw conclusions but that a
number of questions must be asked.
In particular, the team wants to know why
the Malaysia Airways plane was shot down rather than one from the ‘enemy’
Ukraine airforce. ‘It is really important for us to know this,’ he said.
‘Why
was the BUK used to bring down a passenger airline rather than a jet fighter or
an Antonov from Ukraine,’ he said. ‘What was the aim?’
All 298 people on board
flight MH17 were killed when it was struck by a missile on July 17, 2014, and
crashed into fields in eastern Ukraine. Two-thirds of the passengers on the
flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were Dutch.
The JIT’s preliminary
investigations concluded last year that the plane was shot down from Ukrainian
farmland by a BUK missile ‘controlled by pro-Russian fighters’. That conclusion
has been disputed by Russia, which claims that Ukrainian fighters were
responsible.
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