Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 295 people crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday and appears to have been shot out of the sky by a missile fired from the area where pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian government troops have been fighting for months, aviation and military analysts said.
An advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said the Boeing 777-200ER was downed by a ground-to-air missile over territory controlled by pro-Russia insurgents near the city of Donetsk.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when it failed to confirm its entry into Russian airspace on schedule at 5:20 p.m., Russia’s Interfax news agency said.
The jet began losing altitude about 35 miles before entering Russian airspace and “fell down,” minutes later, setting off its emergency beacon, the Itar-Tass news agency said.
A midair breakup of a long-haul aircraft due to in-flight malfunction is “highly, highly unlikely,” an aviation industry consultant in the Seattle area said, a fact that bolstered suspicion that the plane had been shot down.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said his nation’s armed forces “did not take action against any airborne targets” on Thursday. Ukrainian officials in Kiev noted in their statements on the crash that the pro-Russia militants have shot down a number of aircraft in recent days over the territory they claim to control.
Earlier in the day, Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of being behind the downing of a Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft near Donetsk on Wednesday.
State-controlled Russia Today television said it had been told by officials of the separatist-proclaimed Peoples Republic of Donetsk that the militants had nothing to do with the Malaysian jet crash.
Militants were the first to reach the crash site, Interfax reported.
“Our self-defense units are already on the site,” Andrei Purgin, first deputy premier of the region, said in a telephone interview with The Times in Moscow. “They already reported many dead passengers including children.”
Sergei Taruta, the Kiev-appointed governor of the Donetsk region sidelined by the militants, said in a statement posted on his administration’s website that the militants were blocking the crash site.
“Right now representatives of the Peoples Republic of Donetsk are preventing rescue workers and law enforcement officers from arriving at the tragedy’s site,” Taruta said. “This can seriously hinder the course of the investigation and the establishing of real reasons for the tragedy and its scope.”
Russia Today posted photos said to have been taken at the crash scene, including one showing a twisted body lying next to two airline seats and another showing a large piece of the fuselage in an open field. The pictures suggested the wreckage came down in pieces over a wide area.
A witness described the crash scene as “the most gory sight” he had ever seen.
“Distorted bodies of dead people and body parts are lying around everywhere in an open field,” Sergei Kavtaradze, a member of the Security Council of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, said in a phone interview with The Times.
“Our rescue workers and firemen have been working here for several hours. Two things are absolutely clear now: Everyone on board is dead, and it was not us who shot down the plane, as we don’t have this hardware and we don’t have specialists to operate it.”
The flight recorders had not been found yet, Kavtaradze said, “but once we find them we may send them to Moscow or hand them over to representatives of the airline.”
Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted Donetsk separatist leader Alexander Borodai as saying the militants were calling a two- to three-day cease-fire to facilitate investigation of the crash. Borodai was quoted as saying the incident looked to him to have been a “provocation.”
President Obama said U.S. officials were trying to determine whether American citizens were on board. Malaysia Airlines did not immediately release details of the passenger manifest, though unconfirmed reports said that is included at least 22 Americans. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told a reporter from The Hill that 23 Americans were on the flight.
Obama said the crash “looks like it may be a terrible tragedy” and offered his thoughts and prayers to families of the victims. “The United States will offer any assistance we can to help determine what happened and why,” he told reporters in Wilmington, Del.
Vice President Joe Biden called President Poroshenko to offer U.S. assistance in the investigation, the White House said in a statement.
The aviation website Flightaware said the last recorded position of MH17 was made at 13:20 UTC [6:20 a.m. PDT] just west of the eastern border of Ukraine.
A Russian emergency response team was dispatched to the crash site in the village of Torez, about 25 miles west of the Russian border. The area has been the scene of fierce fighting between pro-Russia militants who have seized and occupied much of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Ukrainian government troops trying to recover control of the eastern territory.
The plane “disappeared from radar at 10,000 meters [33,000 feet, or more than six miles high] and then crashed near the city of Shakhtarsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, a source in the Ukrainian law enforcement authorities said,” according to Interfax-Ukraine.
Ukrainian Interior Ministry advisor Anton Gerashchenko said the plane was hit by a rocket fired from a Buk antiaircraft system, capable of reaching targets as far away as 19 miles, which he maintained had been provided to the militants by Russia. Ukrainian officials have accused the Kremlin of supporting the separatist insurrection, an accusation Moscow denies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea territory to Russia in March after a swift occupation by Russian troops and a hastily organized referendum on independence. The militants in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions appear to have been inspired by the Crimea seizure and some have urged Putin to annex the Ukrainian territory they have occupied since March.
“The cynicism of Putin and his terrorists has no limits,” Gerashchenko said in Russian in a post on his Facebook page, blaming the militants for Malaysian jet downing.
“This was done by terrorists to whom Putin kindly handed such a formidable weapon as Buk to protect themselves from Ukraine air force,” Gerashchenko wrote. “They thought they were shooting at a Ukraine military plane and destroyed almost 300 innocent residents of Europe and Asia. Putin gave monkeys a grenade and must be held responsible for this before an international tribunal.”
Matthew Schmidt, a former military operations planning instructor at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies now teaching at the University of New Haven, said the Boeing 777 could not have been brought down by a portable rocket-launcher of the type known to be used by the militants.
Schmidt said he suspected that the airliner was mistaken for a Ukrainian military transport plane and that it was shot down by a fixed Russian ground-to-air missile launcher or from a fighter jet.
“There is credible evidence that this plane was shot down by Russian air defense, from the Russian side of the border. Ukraine does not knowingly have ground-based air defense in the region,” Schmidt, who has a doctorate in Russian affairs and recently returned from Ukraine where he served as an election monitor in late May, said in an email to The Times.
However, a Ukrainian official suggested that the militants were to blame. Separatists had been shooting at a Ukrainian Il-86 military transport plane carrying supplies to government troops in the area at the same time that the Malaysian passenger plane crashed, said Alexei Dmitrashkovsky, spokesman for the government’s operation to retake the rebel-held territory.
“Our plane avoided the impact but the missile went up and shot the other plane flying at much higher altitude,” he added. “The area where the plane was shot down is in complete control of pro-Russia rebels.”
Ukraine’s Security Service posted on it website what it claimed were audio and transcripts of intercepted telephone conversations betweenmilitants and their “curators” in Russia.
After informing the Russian side that a plane had been shot down by a group known as the Miners, the separatist officer was said to have had the following exchange:
month at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. (Ahmad Yusni / European Pressphoto Agency)
“The plane was shot down by Cossacks who man Chernukhino checkpoint. The plane disintegrated in mid-air over the coal mine of Petropavlovskaya. They found the first 200th [Russian military slang for dead]. He is a civilian.”
Another excerpt of the transcript a short time later recorded the militant officer saying the downed aircraft was “100% civilian plane.”
Asked by the Russian side whether there were many casualties, he said, “A hell of a lot. Broken pieces were falling right in the backyards.”
The separatist reported finding only “civilian things” amid the wreckage and identifying one of the casualties as an Indonesian student.
Boeing Co.’s 777 is considered one of the safest aircraft in the skies today. Nearly all of the world’s most important airlines use the plane on long-range routes. It has been a major workhorse for carriers flying from the United States to Europe and Asia.
“In-flight break-ups due to something wrong with the airplane are highly, highly unlikely, certainly suggesting an ‘outside force’ may have been involved,” said Scott Hamilton, an aviation industry consultant and managing director of Leeham Co. in Issaquah, Wash.
In a statement, Boeing said it would provide whatever assistance is requested by authorities.
Malaysia Airlines reported on Twitter and Facebook that it lost contact with a plane after its last known position over Ukrainian territory.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mohd Najib Tun Razak said via Twitter that he was shocked by reports of the crash. “We are launching an immediate investigation,” he said.
Malaysia Airlines also lost a Boeing 777 on March 7, when Flight MH370 en route to Beijing went missing, setting off a vast search and a mystery that continues to hold the world’s attention.
The flight tracking website Flightaware.com, which showed MH17 over Ukraine when it disappeared, shows that the 11-hour, 30-minute flight is a daily route between Amsterdam and Kuala Lampur.
Despite months of violence in the Russia-Ukraine border region, it is a “heavily trafficked” route for airlines, said Andrew Taylor, who works in aviation services for Flightaware.com. For instance, the website shows that there were more than 20 flights slated Thursday between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Obama and Putin spoke Thursday morning, at Moscow’s request, to discuss new sanctions the U.S. imposed Wednesday on Russia for its role in the Ukraine conflict. It was unclear whether their conversation took place before Obama learned of the Malaysian airliner crash.
Earnest said the president had been briefed about the crash and had instructed his staff to keep him updated, and to contact senior Ukrainian officials.
Times staff writers W.J. Hennigan in Los Angeles, Julie Makinen in Beijing and Kathleen Hennessey in Washington contributed to this report.
source: latimes.com
STUDIO 3 NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA 