Malaysian Airlines fight MH17 carrying 295 passengers and crew crashes in eastern Ukraine, in apparent missile strike.
A Malaysian airliner was brought down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 295 people aboard and sharply raising the stakes in a conflict between Kiev and pro-Moscow rebels in which Russia and the West back opposing sides.
Ukraine accused “terrorists” – fighters aiming to unite eastern Ukraine with Russia – of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with a heavy, Soviet-era SA-11 ground-to-air missile as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday.
Leaders of the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic denied any involvement, although around the same time their military commander said his forces had downed a much smaller Ukrainian transport plane. It would be their third such kill this week.
Journalists saw burning and charred wreckage bearing the red and blue Malaysia insignia and dozens of bodies strewn in fields near the village of Hrabove, 40km from the Russian border near the rebel-held regional capital of Donetsk.
Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from Moscow, said the plane fell in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
“The investigation would be very difficult given that it’s controlled by the rebels,” he said. “Ukrainian officials are saying that many children were dead. Some are saying that all died. Reuters is reporting that body parts were found at the scene. It seems that it was a very gruesome scene.”
Despite the shooting down of several Ukrainian military aircraft in the area in recent months, including two this week, and renewed accusations from Kiev that Russian forces were taking a direct part, international air lanes had remained open.
In a news conference held at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, officials said that 154 Dutch citizens were aboard the aircraft. 27 Australians, 23, Malaysians, 11, Indonesian, six British, four German, four Belgian, three Filipinos and one Canadian were also on board.
The nationalities of the remaining passengers have not yet been announced.
Malaysia Airlines said air traffic controllers lost contact with flight MH17 at 1415 GMT as it flew over eastern Ukraine towards the Russian border, bound for Asia with 280 passengers and 15 crew aboard.
Flight tracking data indicated it was at its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet when it disappeared.
That would be beyond the range of smaller rockets used by the rebels to bring down helicopters and other low-flying Ukrainian military aircraft – but not of the SA-11 system which a Ukrainian official accused Russia of supplying to the rebels.
“I was working in the field on my tractor when I heard the sound of a plane and then a bang,” one local man at told Reuters news agency at Hrabove, known in Russian as Grabovo.
“Then I saw the plane hit the ground and break in two. There was thick black smoke.”
An emergency worker said at least 100 bodies had been found so far and that debris was spread over 15km.
People were scouring the area for the black box flight recorders and separatists were later quoted as saying they had found one.
“MH17 is not an incident or catastrophe, it is a terrorist attack,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted. He has stepped up his military campaign against the rebels since a ceasefire late last month failed to produce any negotiations.
Russia, which Western powers accuse of trying to destabilise Ukraine to maintain influence over its old Soviet empire, has accused Kiev’s leaders of mounting a fascist coup.
It says it is holding troops in readiness to protect Russian-speakers in the east – the same rationale it used for taking over Crimea.
Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko said on Facebook: “Just now, over Torez, terrorists using a Buk anti-aircraft system kindly given to them by Putin have shot down a civilian airliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.”
The Buk is a 1970s vintage, truck-mounted, radar-guided missile system, codenamed SA-11 Gadfly by Cold War NATO adversaries. It fires a 5.7-metre, 55-kg missiles for up to 28km.
Rebel accusation
A rebel leader said Ukrainian forces shot the airliner down and that rebel forces did not have weaponry capable of hitting a plane flying 10km up. Ukrainian officials said their military was not involved in the incident.
The military commander of the rebels, a Russian named Igor Strelkov, had written on his social media page at 1337 GMT, half an hour before the last reported contact with MH-17, that his forces had brought down an Antonov An-26, a turboprop transport plane of type used by Ukraine’s forces, in the same area.
There was no comment on that from the Ukrainian military.
Several Ukrainian planes and helicopters have been shot down in four months of fighting in the area. Ukraine had said an An-26 was shot down on Monday and one of its Sukhoi Su-25 fighters was downed on Wednesday by an air-to-air missile – Kiev’s strongest accusation yet of direct Russian involvement, since the rebels do not appear to have access to aircraft.
Moscow has denied its forces are involved in any way.
The loss of MH-17 is the second disaster for Malaysia Airlines this year, following the mysterious loss of flight MH-370. It disappeared in March with 239 passengers and crew on board on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
In 2001, Ukraine admitted its military was probably responsible for shooting down a Russian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 78 people on board.
A senior Ukrainian official said it had most likely been downed by an accidental hit from an S-200 rocket fired during exercises.(Aljazeera.com)
