Brussels - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide maximum cooperation in investigating the crash of the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane in Ukraine.
“I spoke with President Putin in Milan and called for maximum cooperation in investigating the MH17 crash,” he wrote on Twitter.
The meeting between Rutte and Putin took place on the sidelines of the ASEM summit, which opened in Milan on Oct. 16, Dutch media reported.
On Monday, four Dutch experts returned to the crash site of the Malaysian aircraft in Ukraine, but Dutch officials, including Rutte, said they were dissatisfied that it was difficult to access the site.
The Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777, which was flying from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), crashed 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 nationality), four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.
The Dutch Safety Board published a preliminary report on an investigation into the MH17 crash on Sept. 9, which says that the plane did not have technical faults and its in-flight disintegration was caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated it from the outside.
