MOSCOW, July 21 (RIA Novosti) – The alleged recordings of intercepted phone calls between Russian military intelligence officers and Donetsk militiamen discussing the flight MH17 being downed in eastern Ukraine are fake, the Russian ambassador in India told Chennai daily newspaper The Hindu on Monday.
Ambassador Alexander Kadakin said the so-called “intercepts” were “totally fabricated fakes, pre-recorded one day before the tragic air crash.”
“Experts have proved that they are a montage of several separate cuttings done much before the airliner was shot down,” he said.
The recordings were released by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and played to journalists at a news conference.
According to Ukrainian government, the country’s secret service had recorded Ihor Bezler, a commander of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk’s troops stationed in the village of Horlivka, as admitting the Malaysian plane was shot down by militia manning the Chernukhinsk checkpoint nearby.
“Fakes cannot serve as an arsenal of arguments in diplomacy,” Kadakin stressed.
He called for a transparent and objective investigation that must first clarify all details of this deadly crash before making any conclusions or “blaming anybody for the tragedy.”
The Malaysia Airlines plane en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 near the town of Torez in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region, killing 298 people.
The same day, Kiev accused local militia of striking the plane down with the help of a long-range Buk missile system that had allegedly been given to them by Russia. Militia members insist that they have no required technology to shoot a target at an altitude of 10,000 meters (6.2 miles).
The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier there was no way it could have smuggled this kind of military hardware across the border “in secrecy.”
