MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crashed with 298 people on board on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine after being shot down while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. Kiev and pro-independence militia in Ukraine's southeast have blamed each other for the downing of the plane.
The JIT brings together the Public Prosecution Service, Police of the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine.
"An important question for the criminal investigation is whether a missile can be launched unintentionally. Did anyone accidentally push a button which caused the missile to be launched? Or can this only be done by means of a conscious act? And how exactly does the weapon system select its target," the prosecutors said in an online magazine.
Dutch investigators published a report in October 2015 in which it stated the Malaysia Airlines aircraft appeared to have been downed using a Russia-produced Buk surface-to-air missile system. The report did not identify the exact location from where the missile was fired.
The Russian arms manufacturer that builds Buk missile systems, Almaz-Antey, conducted a separate probe into the crash, finding that the missile that hit the plane could only have been launched from the region of Zaroshchenske, controlled by Kiev forces at the time of the incident.
