After the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane crashed on July 17 in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast with 298 people on board, Kremlin-backed enthusiastically claimed credit, saying they thought they had shot down another Ukrainian military transport plane. “We did warn you - do not fly in our sky,” Kremlin-backed separatist leader Igor Girkin, a Russian intelligence service officer, wrote on his official Vkontakte soon after the tragedy.
Though when the gravity of the mistake became obvious, the Russian-backed insurgents backpedaled and claimed innocence.
The statements of Girkin posted on his Vkontakte page on July 18 appeared to be a lot more confusing.
According to Girkin, the plane’s passengers were already dead when the plane went down.
“I just talked to two people who were gathering corpses, both from Shakhtarsk (the city where the plane crashed) so they came to the spot only 30 minutes after the tragedy. I am writing from their words. They said many corpses were totally bloodless and looked like blood had clotted long before the catastrophe,” the leader of Russian backed insurgents wrote.
Сiting the same locals, Girkin also said a strong putrid smell was noticed in the area of the plane crash. “This smell could not have appeared in a half an hour in any weather, and it was cloudy, not very hot yesterday,” he wrote. According to the terrorist leader there was a special medical cargo on board.
In the same statement Girkin-Strelkov admitted plane pilots were alive and did die as a result of the crash. “The cabin, and its front is in a good condition, is literally spilled with their blood all over,” he wrote.
Meanwhile Girkin’s posts claiming the credit for shooting down a Ukrainian AN-26 military transport plane were deleted and his official group on Vkontakte started backpedaling, stating that information was not confirmed and was just reposted from another source.
“The plane has just been taken down somewhere around Torez (Donetsk Oblast). It lays there behind the Progress mine,” Girkin’s statement from July 17 read. His comrade, Pavel Gubarev, self-proclaimed governor of Donetsk Oblast, also reported the plane crash. “Just shot down the plane somewhere around Snezhnoe,” he wrote on his Vkontakte page, also some 20 minutes after the plane fell down.
Both Girkin and Gubarev seemed to be proud of the act, announcing this news on social networks.
Although the new version of the plane crash provided by the insurgents seems absurd enough to ignore, there actually is proof that it is wrong. The video footage from inside the plane just a few moments before it took off was found on the Instagram account of one of the passengers, Malaysian native, Md Ali Md Salim, who was flying back home from Amsterdam. A short 13 seconds video shows other passengers stowing their luggage.
The video footage from inside the plane just a few moments before it took off showing passengers stowing their luggage.
Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur has disappeared from the radars above the war zone in eastern Ukraine at 4:20 p.m., all the 298 passengers including 15 crew members reported dead.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post intern Iryna Savchuk contributed to the story.
