DONETSK, November 11 (RIA Novosti) – Dutch experts that arrived at the crash site of the Malaysian MH17 flight in eastern Ukraine to collect the passenger plane's wreckage have excluded the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) from the new version of the November 10 protocol, the republic's Emergencies Minister Alexei Kostrubitsky told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
"Yesterday we signed a protocol where it was noted that the Security Council of the Netherlands are to receive the plane wreckage from the DPR and everyone was satisfied and signed it," Kostrubitsky said, commenting the signing of the first version of the protocol on November 10.
Later that day, however, DPR authorities received another edition of the protocol in which the DPR was not mentioned.
"What's interesting is that the first and the second edition [of the protocol] were offered by the Dutch side. Why they have changed it, we do not know," Kostrubitsky said.
According to the minister, the main difference between the two editions is that the second version does not mention the DPR. "They just get the wreckage from someone, from whom it is unclear," he added.
On July 17, a Malaysia Airlines plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk, killing all 298 people on board. Kiev accused independence supporters in eastern Ukraine of shooting the plane down but has not provided any evidence to support its claim.
A preliminary report issued by the Dutch Safety Board early in September suggested that the aircraft broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside.
On November 6, RIA Novosti reported that a group of Dutch experts had begun collecting wreckage from the site of the plane crash in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region. The experts collected small fragments of the plane and placed them in special containers.
