MOSCOW, July 18 (RIA Novosti) – Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile, sources from the US intelligence agencies told the Wall Street Journal, although they didn’t say which side in the Ukrainian conflict was to blame.
According to the paper, intelligence agencies said witnesses reported a plume of smoke rising over the crash site. They didn’t comment on whether the missile was launched by the Kiev-backed troops or the self-defense forces in the region, but said it was a surface-to-air missile.
Malaysia Airlines said Thursday it had lost contact with its Boeing-777 passenger plane en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was in the Ukrainian airspace after Kiev reported about a plane crash north of the town of Torez in the Donetsk region. The aircraft was carrying at least 280 passengers and 15 crew members, with multiple reports coming in on the number of foreign nationals aboard the crashed plane.
The media report adds to the speculations that the plane was shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile system, on of the very few missile systems able to hit targets across the corresponding altitude range. Earlier on Thursday, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister wrote on his Facebook page that a Buk surface-to-air missile system was indeed used to down the plane, but insisted that the self-defense forces of the southeast had done that.
In turn, the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine traded accusations with Kiev saying it was responsible for downing the Malaysian airliner since local militia doesn’t have the required technologies.
Self-defense forces in the conflict zone refuted the accusations of having downed the plane, saying they didn’t have the weaponry capable of bringing down a plane flying at a range of over 3 kilometers.
