MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Two international experts, tasked with examining the radar images that Russia provided after the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to prove that a Buk missile was not in the air at the time of the incident, found that the missile appeared invisible on the images because the high speed at which it was traveling made the projectile undetectable, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service said in a statement.
"A BUK-missile launched from the launching location established by the JIT need not be visible on the radar images of the radar station Ust-Donetsk at all. An important explanation of the absence of the BUK-missile on the radar images lies in the flight properties of a BUK-missile … Because of the fact that this speed is much higher than the speed of civil aircraft, the settings of a civil radar station will ensure that such fast objects generally are not visible on the radar images. This is to prevent ‘clutter’ on the radar image," the statement reads.
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Malaysian Airlines' Boeing 777 crashed in eastern Ukraine in July 2014 during its flight to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. All 298 passengers and crew members on board were killed.
In September 2016, the Dutch-led JIT announced that flight MH17 was allegedly downed by a Buk missile system that was brought from Russia to territories in eastern Ukraine that were beyond Kiev's control and subsequently returned after the crash.
However, Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey, which developed the Buk missile system, has rejected these findings, saying that three simulations showed that the missile was launched from the Zaroshchenske area, which was controlled by Ukraine's army at the time of the downing.
