By Paul Sonne and Alan Cullison
A Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 295 passengers and crew
crashed Thursday while flying over the battle-torn east Ukraine
region of Donetsk, triggering accusations that one or the other
side of the conflict had shot down the aircraft by accident.
Malaysia Airlines said contact was lost with Flight 17 about 50
kilometers (30 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border. The Boeing
777 departed from Amsterdam around noon on Thursday and was due to
arrive in Kuala Lumpur early Friday.
Ukraine's state air-traffic control service confirmed the flight
had crashed and said a special investigation commission has been
rushed to the scene.
The plane went down near the village of Hrabove in the Donetsk
region while flying at a height of about 10,000 meters (32,800
feet), according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's
Interior Ministry.
The crash immediately sparked speculation about the cause. For
months, Ukrainian forces have been trying to subdue pro-Russia
separatists who seized towns across the region in April and
declared an independent republic. The fighting escalated this week
when Ukrainian authorities reported that one of its military cargo
planes and one of its military fighter jets had been downed in the
area.
The disaster comes as a new trauma for Malaysia Airlines, the
carrier already at the center of a global mystery over the
disappearance of one of its flights in March, another Boeing 777
that went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Footage captured by locals from the wreckage site showed a
massive grey plume of smoke emerging from a field before sunset.
Subsequent images pictured Ukrainian emergency forces hosing down
the wreckage, as well as passports, tickets and pieces of bodies
found in tact near the crash site.
The war of accusations kicked off immediately after the crash.
In a phone call with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Gerashchenko
alleged that pro-Russia rebels had set up a ground-to-missile
battery near the Russian border by the town of Snizhne.
"They clearly thought that it was a military transport plane
that they were shooting at," he said. "They were the ones who did
this." His claims couldn't be verified.
In a Facebook post, Mr. Gerashchenko alleged that the
separatists had obtained a Buk surface-to-air missile system that
he said locals saw them parading near the towns of Snizhne and
Torez during the day on Thursday. He said a convoy with the
anti-aircraft missile was seen heading toward Shakhtarsk, a town
not far from the crash site, about an hour before the plane went
down late Thursday afternoon.
In late June, separatist leaders told the Russian news outlets
RIA Novosti and Interfax that they had taken control of a Ukrainian
air-defense base near the village of Oleksiivka equipped with Buk
missiles. The Donetsk People's Republic also posted a photo of the
missiles, sometimes known as Gadfly systems, on its official
Twitter feed at the time, declaring a victory in having seized the
weaponry.
But on Thursday, separatist leaders denied that they had
surface-to-air missiles such as the Buk system that were powerful
enough to shoot down a Boeing 777 flying at such a height.
Sergei Kavtaradze, one of the leaders of the separatist Donetsk
People's Republic, accused Ukrainian forces of having shot down the
plane.
"The plane was shot down by the Ukrainian side," he told the
Interfax news agency. "We simply don't have those kind of air
defense systems."
Ukraine's president and prime minister didn't immediately assign
blame for the incident.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered a special investigation
into the crash, as well as the downing of a Ukrainian AN-26
military cargo aircraft and a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet in the
same area earlier this week.
"This is the third tragic incident in recent days after the
AN-26 and SU-25 were shot down," Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko said in a statement. "We can't rule out that this plane
was also shot down, but we underscore that the Ukrainian armed
forces were not carrying out any actions to strike airborne
targets."
If a passenger jet was shot down over Ukraine, attackers would
have had to use a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system, not
the shoulder-fired weapons that are more accessible and easier to
use.
Those weapons, nicknamed manpads, have been used in attacks
against commercial aircraft in the past. But their range is much
lower than the cruising altitude of 30,000 feet usually used by
passenger jets.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that Ukraine had
advised pilots on Monday not to fly over the conflict zone in
eastern Ukraine at altitudes between 26,000 and 32,000 feet--a
height that Flight 17 appeared to have been exceeding before it
crashed.
Under a codeshare agreement between Malaysia Air and the Dutch
airline KLM, the downed flight was also flying as Flight KL4103.
Dutch public broadcaster NOS reported that at least 55 Dutch
citizens were on board the plane, based on early estimates of
domestic travel agencies. Relatives of passengers gathered late
Thursday at a restaurant in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to be
briefed by officials. The people were escorted by security officers
and couldn't be approached for comment.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said at least four French
citizens were on board Flight 17. Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and
Air India announced that they would no longer route planes over the
contested regions of eastern Ukraine. The FAA said U.S. airlines
had also agreed to avoid the region.
Mr. Poroshenko expressed condolences to the relatives of those
killed and said Ukrainian authorities were engaging in all possible
rescue efforts.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his sympathies to the
prime minister of Malaysia for the crash over Ukrainian airspace,
according to a statement published on the Kremlin's website.
"The Russian head of state asked to convey his most sincere
words of sympathy and support to the families and friends of the
victims," the Kremlin said.
In 2001, the Ukrainian military mistakenly shot down a
commercial passenger jet that was en route from Tel Aviv to
Novosibirsk with a land-to-air missile that was fired during a
military exercise. All the 66 passengers and 12 crew members on
board the plane were killed in the blast.
In Malaysia, Prime Minister Najib Razak expressed shock and said
the government was launching an immediate investigation into the
incident.
Robert Wall, Alexander Kolyandr and Andrey Ostroukh contributed
to this article.
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