Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, Officials Say - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/malaysian-airlines-plane-ukraine.html?emc=edit_th_20140718&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56381892

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, ERIC SCHMITT and RICK GLADSTONEJULY 17, 2014

GRABOVO, Ukraine — A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed and burned on a flowered wheat field Thursday in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and American officials described as a Russian-made antiaircraft missile.

Ukraine accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist attack. American intelligence and military officials said the plane had been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the missile but not its point of origin.

There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed Ukraine’s government for creating what he called conditions for insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three Ukrainian military aircraft. But Mr. Putin did not specifically deny that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Flight Was Headed Toward Closed Routes

PUBLISHED JULY 18

The Malaysian plane was flying on an active route used by commercial airlines every day. Hours before the crash, Russia closed four airways near the Ukrainian border, including one that was a continuation of Flight 17’s route.Related Maps and Multimedia »

Sources: Eurocontrol; Federal Aviation Administration

Whatever the cause, the news of the crashed plane, with a passenger manifest that spanned at least nine countries, elevated the insurgency into a new international crisis. The day before, the United States had slapped new sanctions on Russia for its support of the pro-Kremlin insurgency, which has brought East-West relations to their lowest point in many years.

Making the crash even more of a shock, it was the second time within months that Malaysia Airlines had suffered a mass-casualty flight disaster with international intrigue — and with the same model plane, a Boeing 777-200ER.

The government of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, is still reeling from the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370 over the Indian Ocean in March. Mr. Najib said he was stupefied at the news of Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15 crew members. Aviation officials said the plane had been traveling an approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20 miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens with no distress signal.

“This is a tragic day in what has already been a tragic year for Malaysia,” Mr. Najib told reporters in a televised statement from Kuala Lumpur. “If it transpires that the plane was indeed shot down, we insist that the perpetrators must swiftly be brought to justice.”

Mr. Najib said he had spoken with the leaders of Ukraine and the Netherlands, who promised their cooperation. He also said that he had spoken with President Obama, and that “he and I both agreed that the investigation must not be hindered in any way.” The remark seemed to point to concerns about evidence tampering at the crash site, which is in an area controlled by pro-Russia insurgents.

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Ukraine released what it said was audio of phone calls between rebels and Russian officers. In one call, a rebel is heard saying, “We have just shot down a plane.”

 Publish DateJuly 18, 2014.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin also spoke about the disaster and the broader Ukraine crisis, White House officials said, and Mr. Putin expressed his condolences. But in a statement quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, Mr. Putin said, “This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace in the country, if military operations had not resumed in the southeast of Ukraine.”

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The United Nations Security Council scheduled a meeting on the Ukraine crisis for Friday morning.

Adding to Ukrainian and Western suspicions that pro-Russia separatists were culpable, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as the S.B.U., released audio from what it said were intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday. In the audio, the separatists appeared to acknowledge shooting down a civilian plane.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio of the calls, with English subtitles, posted on YouTube by the S.B.U.

According to a translation of the Russian audio by the English-language Kyiv Post, the recording begins with a separatist commander, identified as Igor Bezler, telling a Russian military intelligence official, “We have just shot down a plane.”

Photo

Separatists at the site of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, near the settlement of Grabovo. The region has been roiled by fighting between pro-Russian militants and the Ukrainian government, and at least one military aircraft has been shot down. CreditMaxim Zmeyev/Reuters

In another call, a man who seems to be at the scene of the crash says that a group of Cossack militiamen shot down the plane. He adds that it was a passenger jet and that the debris contains no sign of military equipment. Asked if there are any weapons, he says: “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medical equipment, towels, toilet paper.”

Asked if there are any documents among the debris, the man says, “Yes, of one Indonesian student.”

Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev, said that the people in the audio sounded shocked by what they had found in the wreckage.

By Thursday night, American intelligence analysts were increasingly focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11 surface-to-air missile system to shoot down the aircraft and operated on their own fire-control radar, outside the checks and balances of the national Ukrainian air-defense network.

“Everything we have, and it is not much, says separatists,” a senior Pentagon official said. “That said, there’s still a lot of conjecture.”

Photo

The crash site of a Malaysia Airlines 777 carrying 298 people in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.CreditDmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press

Russian troops, who have been deployed along the border with eastern Ukraine, have similar SA-11 systems, as well as larger weapons known as SA-20s, Pentagon officials said.

Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, said he had called the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, to express his condolences and to invite Dutch experts to assist in the investigation. “I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act,” Mr. Poroshenko said.

Reporters arriving at the scene near the town of Grabovo described dozens of lifeless bodies strewn about, many intact, in a field dotted with purple flowers, and remnants of the plane scattered across a road lined with fire engines and emergency vehicles. “It fell down in pieces,” one rescue worker said as tents were set up to gather the dead. The carcass of the plane was still smoldering, and rescue workers moved through the dark field with flashlights.

For months, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of a violent pro-Russia separatist uprising. Rebels have claimed responsibility for attacking a Ukrainian military jet as it landed in the city of Luhansk on June 14, and for felling an AN-26 transport plane on Monday and an SU-25 fighter jet on Wednesday. But this would be the first commercial airline disaster to result from the hostilities.

Despite the turmoil, the commercial airspace over eastern Ukraine is heavily trafficked and has remained open. Questions are likely to be raised in the coming days about why the traffic line, which is controlled by Ukraine and Russia, was not closed earlier.

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Amateur Video of Malaysia Airlines Crash

Amateur Video of Malaysia Airlines Crash

After a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in Ukraine on Thursday, several amateur videos were posted online.

 Publish DateJuly 17, 2014.

With the news of the crash on Thursday, Ukraine declared the eastern part of the country a no-fly zone. American and European carriers rerouted their flights, and Aeroflot, Russia’s national carrier, announced that it had suspended all flights to Ukraine for at least three days. The conspicuous exception was Aeroflot flights to Crimea, the southern peninsula that Russiaannexed in March, a pivotal point in the Ukraine crisis.

It was unclear late Thursday whether any Americans had been aboard the flight. Russia’s Interfax news agency said there had been no Russians aboard.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; and 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Belgians, four Germans, three Filipinos and one Canadian. The rest of the passengers had not been identified.

Prof. David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said that a prominent AIDS researcher traveling to the 20th International AIDS conference in Melbourne was among those on the flight.

Professor Cooper, who was heading to the conference from Sydney, said he was unaware how many other passengers were also on their way to the conference, which is scheduled to start on Sunday.

Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an insurgent group in eastern Ukraine, denied in a telephone interview that the rebels had anything to do with the crash. He said that they had shot down Ukrainian planes before but that their antiaircraft weapons could reach only to around 4,000 meters, far below the cruising level of passenger jets.

“We don’t have the technical ability to hit a plane at that height,” Mr. Purgin said.

Mr. Purgin did not rule out the possibility that Ukrainian forces themselves had shot down the plane. “Remember the Black Sea plane disaster,” he said, referring to the 2001 crash of a Siberia Airlines passenger jet, bound for Novosibirsk from Tel Aviv, that the Ukrainians shot down by accident during a military training exercise.

In comments broadcast on Ukrainian television, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, said the crash illustrated the threat to peace in Europe posed by the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “This is not just a local conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, but a full-scale war in the center of Europe,” he said. “I’m certain the international community this time will pay attention and understand.”

Correction: July 17, 2014 

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Ukraine’s president. He is Petro O. Poroshenko, not Poroschenko. An earlier version also misstated the title of Najib Razak. He is the prime minister, not president, of Malaysia. The article had also misstated the direction a Siberian Airlines passenger jet was flying before it was shot down by Ukraine in 2001. It was flying from Israel, not to it.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Grabovo, Ukraine, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow; Noah Sneider from Grabovo; Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker from Washington; Thomas Erdbrink from Amsterdam; C. J. Chivers from the United States; Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia; and Masha Goncharova and Robert Mackey from New York.