GILZE RIJEN: Investigators concluded on Tuesday that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile fired over war-torn Ukraine, but 15 months after the disaster Russia and the West remain locked in a bitter blame game.

The Dutch-led inquiry did not identify who launched the missile that crashed into the Boeing 777 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board.

But Russia, Ukraine and Western nations all seized the moment to step up accusations that the fault for the tragedy lay at someone else’s door.

“Flight MH17 crashed as a result of the detonation of a warhead outside the airplane against the left-hand side of the cockpit,” the chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, Tjibbe Joustra, told a press conference.

“This warhead fits the kind of missile that is installed in the BUK surface-to-air missile system.” The inquiry delineated a 320-square-kilometre area in eastern Ukraine from which the missile must have been fired.

And while the report did not specify whether it was under the control of pro-Russian separatists battling Ukrainian forces, the board’s chairman Joustra later seemed to suggest it was.

“It’s an area where the borders have fluctuated a lot, but it’s a territory where the pro-Russian rebels have laid down the law,” he told Dutch media after briefing lawmakers.

The much-anticipated report also said it was possible that some on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur may have remained conscious during the 90 seconds it took to crash.

The White House, which has long accused pro-Russian rebels of being behind the attack, said its “assessment is unchanged — MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine”.

British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the report was a “step closer to the truth” and “undermines completely the conspiracy theories that Russia has been trying to put around since this appalling act”.

But Moscow reacted angrily saying it had “serious doubts” about the goal of an investigation conducted in the Netherlands, adding it was merely “a justification of accusations that were put forward before”.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2015

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