KUALA LUMPUR: INTELLIGENCE analysts in the United States had already
concluded that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by an
air-to-air missile, and that the Ukrainian government had had something
to do with it.
This corroborates an emerging theory postulated by local
investigators that the Boeing 777-200 was crippled by an air-to-air
missile and finished off with cannon fire from a fighter that had been
shadowing it as it plummeted to earth.
In a damning report dated Aug 3, headlined “Flight 17 Shoot-Down
Scenario Shifts”, Associated Press reporter Robert Parry said “some US
intelligence sources had concluded that the rebels and Russia were
likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were
to blame”.
This new revelation was posted on GlobalResearch, an independent research and media organisation.
In a statement released by the Ukrainian embassy on Tuesday, Kiev
denied that its fighters were airborne during the time MH17 was shot
down. This follows a statement released by the Russian Defence Ministry
that its air traffic control had detected Ukrainian Air Force activity
in the area on the same day.
They also denied all allegations made by the Russian government and
said the country’s core interest was in ensuring an immediate,
comprehensive, transparent and unbiased international investigation into
the tragedy by establishing a state commission comprising experts from
the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and Eurocontrol.
“We have evidence that the plane was downed by Russian-backed
terrorist with a BUK-M1 SAM system (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
reporting name SA-11) which, together with the crew, had been supplied
from Russia. This was all confirmed by our intelligence, intercepted
telephone conversations of the terrorists and satellite pictures.
“At the same time, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have never used any
anti-aircraft missiles since the anti-terrorist operations started in
early April,” the statement read.
Yesterday, the
New Straits Times quoted experts who had
said that photographs of the blast fragmentation patterns on the
fuselage of the airliner showed two distinct shapes — the shredding
pattern associated with a warhead packed with “flechettes”, and the more
uniform, round-type penetration holes consistent with that of cannon
rounds.
Parry’s conclusion also stemmed from the fact that despite assertions
from the Obama administration, there has not been a shred of tangible
evidence to support the conclusion that Russia supplied the rebels with
the BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a
civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet.
Parry also cited a July 29 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
interview with Michael Bociurkiw, one of the first Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) investigators to arrive at the
scene of the disaster, near Donetsk.
Bociurkiw is a Ukrainian-Canadian monitor with OSCE who, along with
another colleague, were the first international monitors to reach the
wreckage after flight MH17 was brought down over eastern Ukraine.
In the CBC interview, the reporter in the video preceded it with:
“The wreckage was still smouldering when a small team from the OSCE got
there. No other officials arrived for days”.
“There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been
really pockmarked with what almost looks like machinegun fire; very,
very strong machinegun fire,” Bociurkiw said in the interview.
Parry had said that Bociurkiw’s testimony is “as close to virgin,
untouched evidence and testimony as we’ll ever get. Unlike a black-box
interpretation-analysis long afterward by the Russian, British or
Ukrainian governments, each of which has a horse in this race, this
testimony from Bociurkiw is raw, independent and comes from one of the
two earliest witnesses to the physical evidence.
“That’s powerfully authoritative testimony. Bociurkiw arrived there
fast because he negotiated with the locals for the rest of the OSCE
team, who were organising to come later,” Parry had said.
Retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko had also weighed in on the new
shootdown theory with Parry and pointed to the entry and exit holes
centred around the cockpit.
“You can see the entry and exit holes. The edge of a portion of the
holes is bent inwards. These are the smaller holes, round and clean,
showing the entry points most likely that of a 30mm caliber projectile.
“The edge of the other, the larger and slightly frayed exit holes,
show shreds of metal pointing produced by the same caliber projectiles.
Moreover, it is evident that these exit holes of the outer layer of the
double aluminum reinforced structure are shredded or bent — outwardly.”
He deduced that in order to have some of those holes fraying
inwardly, and the others fraying outwardly, there had to have been a
second fighter firing into the cockpit from the airliner’s starboard
side. This is critical, as no surface-fired missile (or shrapnel)
hitting the airliner could possibly punch holes into the cockpit from
both sides of the plane.
“It had to have been a hail of bullets from both sides that brought
the plane down. This is Haisenko’s main discovery. You can’t have
projectiles going in both directions — into the left-hand-side fuselage
panel from both its left and right sides — unless they are coming at the
panel from different directions.
“Nobody before Haisenko had noticed that the projectiles had ripped
through that panel from both its left side and its right side. This is
what rules out any ground-fired missile,” Parry had said.
http://www.nst.com.my/node/20961
