MOSCOW, July 19 (RIA Novosti) - Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin compared Washington's hasty conclusions on the cause of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 crash in Ukraine to its statement on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction made years ago.
"The White House has established the guilty even before the investigation of the Boeing accident. Earlier, the White House established the same way that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD [weapons of mass destruction]," Rogozin wrote in his Twitter on Saturday.
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed near the town of Torez in the Donetsk Region on Thursday, killing all the 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.
US President Barack Obama said Friday there was evidence confirming that the plane was shot down by a missile fired from an area controlled by anti-Kiev militia.
Earlier the same day, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said that the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was "likely downed by a surface-to-air missile operated from a separatist-held location in eastern Ukraine."
Kiev also blamed independence supporters in the turbulent Donetsk Region for downing the passenger plane with a surface-to-air missile. The leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, however, said local militia did not have the required technologies to shoot as high as 10,000 meters (33,000 feet) in the air.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Kiev should take responsibility for tragedy and that "the circumstances around the aircraft disaster need to be investigated carefully and objectively."
The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 claiming the country possessed weapons of mass destruction, which threatened global security, although several international monitors found no evidence of such weapons in the country. Iraq's then president, Saddam Hussein, was arrested on accusations for killing 148 Iraqi Shiites in 1982. He was sentenced to death and hung in 2006.
The United States withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2011.
