The international investigation of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane crash can be completed by the end of 2015 at the earliest, according to Ukraine's Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“Today the priority version is that the plane was shot down by the separatists,” Shokin said at a press briefing on March 30 in Kyiv.
This version has the most credibility and proof, but other versions are also being checked by investigators. The international investigation includes Ukraine, Malaysia and the Netherlands.
The MH17 Malaysian Airlines plane was shot down by a missile on July 17, 2014 in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board were killed.
The Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin has said that the Buk missile system which downed Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014 in Donbas did not belong to Ukraine, but it did enter Ukrainian territory from Russia and it subsequently returned to Russia. “The weapon didn’t belong to Ukraine, but it came from the Russia and it went back to Russia,” Shokin said at the briefing, according to Interfax-Ukraine.
The main obstacle for the investigation is inaccessibility of the site of the crash.
“President of Ukraine, Australian and Malaysian prime-ministers tried to get access but neither Russian military government neither terrorist organizations Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People Republic allow it,” Ukraine Security Service head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said at the joint briefing with Shokin.
Shokin invited witnesses of the crash to call his office’s hotline and help investigation.
On March 19 the experts working for the Dutch investigation concluded that MH17 was downed using a Russian-produced missile system Buk.
According to Shokin, the Buk that downed the plane was brought to Ukraine from Russia, and was taken back to Russia on the morning after the catastrophe.
The investigators have established that the exact place where the deadly shot was fired from. Shokin couldn’t reveal the place, but said it was in Donetsk Oblast, in the area controlled by separatists.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yulia Sosnovska can be reached at [email protected].
