MOSCOW, July 18 (RIA Novosti) — The claims of the Kiev government that Malaysian aircraft crash in eastern Ukraine was a terrorist attack, are unacceptable and constitute an attempt to manipulate the investigators’ opinion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.
"Naturally, attempts to claim that it was a terrorist attack, so Ukrainian investigators will keep this in mind while doing their work, is an inadmissible pressure on this commission’s activities," the minister said.
Lavrov urged the UN Security Council to call for an immediate and unbiased investigation into the accident in which a Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed near the town of Torez in the Donetsk Region, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.
"The Security Council should speak in favor of immediate beginning an independent, unbiased, free and transparent investigation. We back a similar decision within the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]," Lavrov said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
On Friday night, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a full, transparent international investigation, and said that, together with the International Civil Aviation Organization, he was closely following every report on the accident.
Ukrainian authorities and Malaysia Airlines are investigating the incident already. OSCE team in Ukraine is expected to arrive at the site soon. The Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), Interpol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are also planning to join the investigation.
Ukraine has closed its airspace over eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv.
A trilateral contact group, consisting of the OSCE representatives, Ukraine and Russia held a video conference with the militia on Friday, urging them to cordon off the crash site.
