Let the world see what Putin is really like! But his HC cheer squad will call it fake news....
Utrecht: A Russian missile shot down Malaysian airlines jet MH17, killing 38 Australians among 298 people aboard, and it belonged to the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade from Kursk, an international investigations team has concluded.
In a landmark press conference on Thursday in the Netherlands, international representatives, including Australian Federal Police, announced they had found "convincing evidence" that flight MH17 was shot down by a Buk-TELAR missile from Russia.
The code on the missile, whose parts were found in a field in eastern Ukraine near where MH17 was shot down, shows it was made in Moscow in 1986.
The investigation team said after "extensive comparative investigation" with dozens of images, they could conclude that the "fingerprint" of the Buk-TELAR fitted that from the Russian brigade.
The official conclusion, announced by Wilbert Paulissen, the head of the national criminal investigation service of the National Police of the Netherlands backs and confirms the theory of NGO Bellingcat that Russian military missiles were involved.
Malaysia Airlines' flight MH17 left Amsterdam bound for Kuala Lumpur but was shot down by a missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
The mid-air explosion killed all 298 people aboard, and set off a diplomatic firestorm. Of the dead passengers, 193 were Dutch and 38 were Australian citizens or residents.
The investigation team announced they had found seven visual "fingerprints" of the Buk-TELAR missile from the 53rd brigade, which matched photos and videos taken both within Russia and inside Ukraine around the time that MH17 was shot down.
They included a transport number which had been partially painted over - which is typically done when a military vehicle is deployed into action.
The visual fingerprints were unique to one particular Buk-TELAR belonging to Russia's 53rd brigade and not to any other, the investigators found.
Fred Westerbeke, chief prosecutor of the National Prosecutor’s Office of the Netherlands, said he could still not answer the questions why, and who was responsible for the atrocity, but that the investigation was "steadily progressing".
The right forum to reveal and test their conclusions about individuals to blame, he said, was a court, not a press conference.
