KIEV, September 9 (RIA Novosti) - Malaysia does not want to risk the safety of its experts by sending them to the MH17 crash site, said the Malaysian Minister of Defense, Hishammuddin Hussein, on Tuesday.
“The Malaysian Minister of Defense Hussein has noted that despite the ceasefire, the attacks [in southeastern Ukraine] are continuing and Malaysia does not want to expose the group of Malaysian experts, engaged in the investigation, to risk and threat. However, upon receiving permission from the Ukrainian Ministry for Regional Development, Malaysia has sent 20 investigators to Ukraine, who will be ready to go to the crash site as soon as possible,” the press service of the Ukrainian Ministry for Regional Development reported, following the meeting of Hishammuddin Hussein and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and head of the Committee on the crash investigation Volodymyr Groysman.
The Malaysian minister also noted that the country’s experts will only go to the crash site together with the experts from Netherlands and Australia.
According to the statement, Hussein and Groysman also discussed the preliminary report on the investigation into the crash of the MH17 plane, released by the Dutch Safety Board earlier on Tuesday.
Flight MH17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed on July 17 in the Donetsk region, killing all 298 people on board. The cause of the crash is still unclear. The Ukrainian government claims that independence supporters in the country’s eastern regions shot the plane down but it has not provided any evidence to support those claims. Local militia leaders insist that they do not have weapons capable of shooting the MH17 aircraft down.
