Access to the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 crash site in Donetsk region is still dangerous as the separatist militants don't observe the ceasefire, Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine, Chief of Staff, Petro Mekhed has said.
According to the ministry’s website, Mekhed said this during a meeting with the special envoy on foreign issues of the Dutch Council for Transportation Security Adrian Jakobovits de Szeged in Kyiv on April 1.
“Mekhed said that the area where Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was downed is completely under the militants’ control. As they don’t observe the conditions of the ceasefire, access to the crash site remains problematic and dangerous,” reads the statement.
Mehked confirmed the readiness of Ukraine to support the investigation into the disaster, adding that the Defense Ministry “does its best to ensure the work of international experts in order to create an objective picture of the tragedy, to find and punish those guilty.”
As reported, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 which was flying from Amsterdam, the Netherlands to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with the flight number MH17, was shot down in eastern Ukraine on July 17. All 298 people on board were killed. They included 192 Dutch citizens (one also had U.S. citizenship), 44 Malaysians, including the 15 crew members, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, ten Britons (one also had South African citizenship), four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.
According to the preliminary results of the international investigation, the plane was downed after being hit by an external object, most likely a rocket. The Ukrainian government has said that flight MH17 was downed by a Buk missile system, delivered to the militants from Russia.
