THE HAGUE (Netherlands) — Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk missile, the Dutch Safety Board said today (Oct 13) in its final report on the July 2014 crash that killed all 298 aboard.

“A 9n314m warhead detonated outside the aeroplane to the left side of the cockpit. This fits the kind of warhead installed in the Buk surface-to-air missile system,” said Safety Board head Tjibbe Joustra, presenting the report. Russia had disputed the type of missile used, he added.

The Dutch investigators said the missile exploded less than a metre from the MH17 cockpit, killing three crew in the cockpit and breaking off the front of the plane. The aircraft broke up in the air and crashed over a large area controlled by rebel separatists who had been fighting government troops there since April 2014.
 
At a meeting with victims’ families earlier Tuesday, Mr Joustra said passengers who were not killed by the impact of the missile would have been rendered unconscious by the sudden decompression of the aircraft and a lack of oxygen at 33,000 feet,

The board said the plane should never have been flying there as Ukraine should have closed its airspace to civil aviation, adding that nobody gave a thought to the dangers to passenger planes.

The board said that the 61 airlines that had continued flying there should have recognised the potential danger. It recommended international aviation rules be changed to force operators to be more transparent about their choice of routes. 

Mr Joustra was speaking at the Gilze-Rijen military base, where investigators unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of the forward section of MH17. Some of the nose, cockpit and business class of the Boeing 777 were rebuilt from fragments of the aircraft recovered from the crash scene and flown to Gilze-Rijen air base in southern Netherlands.

The long awaited findings of the board, which was not empowered to address questions of responsibility, did not specify who launched the missile.

Hours earlier, the missile’s Russian maker presented its own report trying to clear Russia-backed separatists who controlled the area or Russia of any involvement in the crash. Ukraine and Western countries contend the airliner was downed by a missile fired by Russia-backed rebels or Russian forces, from rebel-controlled territory.
 
The Russian state-controlled Almaz-Antey arms-maker said it conducted two experiments — in one of which a Buk missile was detonated near the nose of an airplane similar to a 777 — that contradict that conclusion that the plane was shot down by a Buk missile warhead. The experimental aircraft’s remains showed a much different submunitions damage pattern than seen on the remnants of MH17, the company said in a statement.
 
Almaz-Antey in June had said that a preliminary investigation suggested that the plane was downed by a model of Buk that is no longer in service with the Russian military but that was part of the Ukrainian military arsenal.
 
Information from the first experiment, in which a missile was fired at aluminum sheets mimicking an airliner’s fuselage, was presented to the Dutch investigators, but was not taken into account, Almaz-Antey chief Novikov said.

Ahead of the investigation’s final report today, Dutch Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra explained the conclusions of the 15-month investigation to families of the victims. Families of the victims were told all on board died almost instantly.

Mr Robby Oehlers, whose cousin Daisy was among the 298 people killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, said the conclusion was shared with family members at a meeting. He said: “It was a Buk.” Mr Oehlers said it was “as quiet as a mouse” as Mr Joustra explained the conclusions. AGENCIES