By Paul Sonne and Alan Cullison
A Malaysia Airlines plane carrying at least 280 passengers and
15 crew crashed Thursday in the battle-torn east Ukraine region of
Donetsk, where U.S. intelligence agencies say it was struck by a
ground-to-air missile.
The U.S. agencies are divided over whether the missile was
launched by the Russian military or by pro-Russia separatist
rebels, who officials say lack the expertise on their own to bring
down a commercial airline in mid-flight.
"All roads lead to the Russians to some degree," said a U.S.
official.
The disaster comes as a new trauma for Malaysia Airlines, the
carrier already at the center of a global mystery over the
disappearance in March of one of its flights, another Boeing 777
that went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The airline said contact was lost with Flight 17 about 50
kilometers (30 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border. The Boeing
777 left Amsterdam around noon on Thursday and was due to arrive in
Kuala Lumpur early Friday.
The plane went down near the separatist-controlled village of
Hrabove in an area that has witnessed heavy fighting in recent
days. The separatists immediately sent their personnel to the
scene, which Ukrainian authorities complained they were unable to
reach.
Konstantin Knyrik, a spokesman for a separatist group called the
South East Front, told the Interfax news agency that the rebels had
located the Boeing 777's black boxes at the crash site. He said
law-enforcement officials from the Donetsk region who had sided
with the rebels were working on the matter. "They will engage in
documentation and investigation of the incident," he told
Interfax.
Serhiy Taruta, the tycoon whom the authorities in Kiev appointed
governor of the Donetsk region, said separatists were preventing
Ukrainian law-enforcement and rescue authorities from accessing the
crash site. "This may seriously affect the course of the
investigation and the explanation of the true reasons for this
tragedy and its scope," he said.
Footage captured by locals from the wreckage site showed a
massive gray plume of smoke emerging from a field before sunset.
Subsequent images pictured emergency forces hosing down the
wreckage, as well as passports, tickets and pieces of bodies found
near the crash site.
For months, Ukrainian forces have been trying to subdue
pro-Russia separatists who seized towns across the region in April
and declared an independent republic. The fighting escalated this
week when Ukrainian authorities reported that one of its military
cargo planes and one of its military fighter jets had been downed
in the area.
The crash ignited an immediate war of accusations. In a phone
call with The Wall Street Journal, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser
to Ukraine's Interior Ministry, alleged that pro-Russia rebels had
set up a ground-to-air missile battery near the Russian border by
the town of Snizhne.
"They clearly thought that it was a military transport plane
that they were shooting at," he said. "They were the ones who did
this." His claims couldn't be verified.
In a Facebook post, Mr. Gerashchenko alleged that the
separatists had obtained a Buk ground-to-air missile system that
locals had seen being paraded near the towns of Snizhne and Torez
during the day on Thursday. He said a convoy with the anti-aircraft
missile was seen heading toward Shakhtarsk, a town not far from the
crash site, about an hour before the plane went down late Thursday
afternoon.
In late June, separatist leaders told the Russian news outlets
RIA Novosti and Interfax that they had taken control of a Ukrainian
air-defense base near the village of Oleksiivka equipped with Buk
missiles. The separatist Donetsk People's Republic also posted a
photo of the missiles, sometimes known as Gadfly systems, on its
official Twitter feed at the time, declaring a victory in having
seized the weaponry. The Russian maker of the Buk system,
Almaz-Antey, is among the firms the U.S. subjected to new sanctions
this week.
But on Thursday, separatist leaders denied that they had
ground-to-air missiles such as the Buk system that were powerful
enough to shoot down a Boeing 777 flying at such a height.
Sergei Kavtaradze, one of the leaders of the separatist Donetsk
People's Republic, accused Ukrainian forces of having shot down the
plane.
"The plane was shot down by the Ukrainian side," he told the
Interfax news agency. "We simply don't have those kind of
air-defense systems."
Ukraine's president and prime minister didn't immediately assign
blame for the incident.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered a special investigation
into the crash, as well as into the downing of a Ukrainian AN-26
military cargo aircraft and a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet in the
same area earlier this week.
"This is the third tragic incident in recent days after the
AN-26 and SU-25 were shot down," Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko said. "We can't rule out that this plane was also shot
down, but we underscore that the Ukrainian armed forces were not
carrying out any actions to strike airborne targets."
If a passenger jet was shot down over Ukraine, attackers would
have had to use a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system, not
the shoulder-fired weapons that the separatists say they possess
and are easier to use.
Those weapons, nicknamed manpads, have been used in attacks
against commercial aircraft in the past. But their range doesn't
approach the 30,000-foot cruising altitude of passenger jets.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said that Ukraine had
advised pilots on Monday not to fly over the conflict zone in
eastern Ukraine at altitudes between 26,000 and 32,000 feet. Flight
data from tracking company FlightAware indicated that Flight 17 was
flying at 33,000 feet before it came down.
Under a code-share agreement between Malaysia Airlines and Dutch
airline KLM, part of Air France-KLM, the downed flight was also
flying as Flight KL4103. Huib Gorter, vice president of Malaysia
Airlines Europe, said the plane carried 154 Dutch citizens, 27
Australians, 23 Malaysians, 11 Indians, 6 Britons, 4 Germans, 3
Filipinos, and one Canadian. The nationality of 47 passengers,
including any Americans, hadn't been confirmed, he said. French
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said at least four French citizens
were on board.
Relatives of passengers gathered late Thursday at a restaurant
in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to be briefed by officials. They
were escorted by security officers and couldn't be approached to
comment.
Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and Air India announced that they
would no longer route planes over the contested regions of eastern
Ukraine. The FAA said U.S. airlines had also agreed to avoid the
area.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Flight 17 wasn't
flying in restricted airspace, and that it sent no distress call
before crashing.
"If it transpires that the plane was indeed shot down, we insist
that the perpetrators must swiftly be brought to justice," the
prime minister told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
At the airport in the Malaysian capital, family members
expressed frustration over the lack of information and grief over
their likely losses. Akmar Mohd Noor said her sister was aboard
Flight 17 to join her family for the end of Ramadan celebrations.
"She was coming back from Geneva to celebrate with us for the first
time in 30 years," she said through tears.
Mr. Poroshenko expressed condolences to the relatives of those
killed and said Ukrainian authorities were engaging in all possible
rescue efforts.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his sympathies to the
prime minister of Malaysia for the crash over Ukrainian airspace,
according to a statement published on the Kremlin's website.
"The Russian head of state asked to convey his most sincere
words of sympathy and support to the families and friends of the
victims," the Kremlin said.
In 2001, the Ukrainian military mistakenly shot down a
commercial passenger jet that was en route from Tel Aviv to
Novosibirsk with a land-to-air missile that was fired during a
military exercise. All 66 passengers and 12 crew members on board
the plane were killed in the blast.
Jason Ng, Robin van Daalen, Robert Wall, Alexander Kolyandr and
Andrey Ostroukh contributed to this article.
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