Updated 9:52 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, October 20 (RIA Novosti) - Kiev bears full responsibility for the crash of the Malaysian Boeing passenger plane in eastern Ukraine, other claims are pure speculations, Russia's civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, said Monday.
"The catastrophe occurred in the Ukrainian skies and Ukraine is fully responsible for everything that took place in the country's airspace," Rosaviatsia head Alexander Neradko said in an interview with the Rossiya 24 TV channel.
Commenting on a recent report by German intelligence on the downing of the Malaysian plane by a Buk missile fired by independence militia in eastern Ukraine, Neradko stressed that other claims about the causes of the crash appear to be pure speculations as they lack objectivity and cannot be supported by real evidence.
On Sunday, it was reported that Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) had discovered that some of the evidence on the MH17 crash provided by Kiev was falsified. BND's chief Gerhard Schindler also claimed his agency had found out that independence supporters shot down the plane using a Buk missile system, though no evidence was unveiled.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 people on board.
The official cause of the tragedy is still unclear, but according to a preliminary report issued by the Dutch Safety Board on September 9, the plane broke up in mid-air as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside.
The Ukrainian government blames independence supporters of the eastern regions for downing the Malaysia Airlines plane, but the latter say they do not have weapons capable of bringing down an aircraft flying at high altitude.
