WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Russian air defense system producer Almaz-Antey General Director Yan Novikov, following the manufacturer's own investigation, said that the missile that downed the Boeing 777 over Ukraine could only have been a 9M38 missile from a Buk system launched from the region of Zaroshchenske.
This type of missile was removed from the Russian armed forces in 2011.
"What I find strange about the Dutch report is its failure to cite any evidence corroborating Secretary of State [John] Kerry's very detailed initial charges fingering the Russian armed forces as responsible for the downing of MH17," Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said on Tuesday.
Freeman asserted the report’s failure to provide any detailed confirmation of Kerry’s charges was bound to undermine its credibility.
"If the evidence exists, it is irresponsible not to provide it or at least attest to it. The failure to do so can only feed suspicions that Kerry's charges were at best premature and ill-founded, and at worst prejudicial and embarrassingly disproved by later reviews of the intelligence," Freeman said.
The Dutch report also left open the question of who fired the Buk missile at the airplane, the envoy pointed out.
"The report appears to demonstrate convincingly that a Buk system downed the airliner. It sheds no light on who owned or operated that system or even whether the missile it fired was fired from territory controlled by the Ukrainian government or the secessionist forces in eastern Ukraine," Freeman said.
Robert Parry, publisher of Consortium news and authority on the MH17 disaster, told Sputnik on Tuesday that the Dutch report ignored some key questions raised by Russian investigators.
"The report does accept the idea of an older-model Buk as responsible. The report does ignore the Russian questions about the Ukrainian Buk electronics going on. I don't know why, presumably because they weren't trying to assess blame," he said.
Black underscored the Dutch report states that a ground-to-air Buk missile, which only Kiev forces are known to possess, brought down the plane.
