Ukraine Says Malaysian Jet with 295 on Board Shot Down near Russia Border
A Malaysian passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down Thursday over a town in eastern Ukraine, an official said.
Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister, said on his Facebook page the plane was flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters (33,000 feet) when it was hit by a missile fired from a Buk launcher, which can fire missiles up to an altitude of 22,000 meters (72,000 feet).
A similar launcher was seen by Associated Press journalists near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne earlier Thursday.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for his part said that the jet may have been shot down.
"We do not exclude that the plane was shot down and confirm that the Ukraine Armed Forces did not fire at any targets in the sky," Poroshenko said in a statement posted on the president's website.
Later, the president's spokesman said Poroshenko believes that pro-Russian insurgents had shot down the Malaysian Airlines jet, and views it as a "terrorist act."
"Poroshenko on the downed plane: this incident is not a catastrophe. It is a terrorist act," the spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko posted on his official Twitter account.
Rebels fighting central Kiev authorities claimed that the airliner that had been shot down by a Ukrainian jet.
"Witnesses watching the flight of the Boeing 777 passenger plane saw it being attacked by a battle plane of the Ukrainian forces," the government of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic said in a statement.
"After that the passenger plane split in two in the air and fell on the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic," said the statement, adding that the Ukrainian jet was shot down afterwards.
Malaysia Airlines said on its Twitter feed that it "has lost contact of MH17 from Amsterdam. The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace. More details to follow."
Dozens of severely mutilated corpses could be seen strewn in the wreckage of the airliner but there were no signs of survivors, an Agence France Presse reporter at the scene said.
Debris was spread out for kilometers and the tail of a passenger jet lay in a corn field with the Malaysian Airlines insignia on it while insurgent fighters and several fire trucks were seen nearby the crash site.
Eyewitnesses told AFP that the jet appeared to explode in mid-air before wreckage rained down over a large area.
Shocked local residents struggled to take in the scene of the carnage and said that remnants of the jet had been found in a village some 9 kilometers from the center of the crash site.
"I had just gone to sleep at around 1600 (1300 GMT) when I heard an enormous bang," Katya, 64, told AFP. "It was like an earthquake."
Her daughter Natalya, 36, said that she had fled to safety when the sound of the explosion rumbled overhead.
"I took my baby and went and hid in the basement," she said.
There was no sign of any rescue workers going through the gruesome site.
Earlier, Russian and Ukrainian news agencies quoted aviation and security sources as saying that the airliner was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and that it had "crashed" in east Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels are battling government forces.
The Boeing passenger liner came down close to the town of Shaktarsk in the rebellion-wracked region of Donetsk after disappearing from the radar and teams from the emergency services were trying to reach the scene, an unnamed security source told Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
"I am shocked by reports that an MH plane crashed," Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on his Twitter feed.
"We are launching an immediate investigation."
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama spoke about the Malaysian passenger incident, the Kremlin said Thursday.
"The Russian leader informed the U.S. president about an air-traffic controllers' report that came just before their phone conversation that a Malaysian plane crashed in Ukraine," the Kremlin said in a statement.
Malaysian Defense Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said on Twitter there's no confirmation that Thursday's plane was shot down. He said he has instructed the country's military to check and get confirmation.
The Malaysia Airlines plane is a Boeing 777-200ER, which was delivered to Malaysia Airlines on July 30, 1997, according to Flightglobal's Ascend Online Fleets, which sells and tracks information about aircraft. It has more than 43,000 hours of flight time and 6,950 takeoffs and landings.
Meanwhile, a social media site attributed to a top Ukrainian rebel commander said the insurgents had shot down an army transporter at the location where the Malaysia Airlines plane crashed Thursday near the Russian border.
The comments by the top military commander of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" suggest the separatists had shot down the Malaysia Airlines plane by mistake, believing it was a large Ukrainian army transport plane.
"We just downed an An-26 near Torez. It is down near the Progress mine," said the VK page attributed to Igor Strelkov, which is frequently quoted by Ukrainian media.
The rebels shot down another An-26 in rebel-held eastern Ukraine on June 14, killing 49 government servicemen.
"We had warned (the Ukrainian armed forces) not to fly in 'our sky'," Strelkov says in the post.
"And here is a video confirming that a 'bird fell'," said the post.
The website then provides a link that is identical to that published by Ukrainian media in reports about the Malaysia Airlines jet.
The video shows locals referring to the Progress coal mine mentioned by Strelkov.
It was the second time that a Malaysia Airlines plane had gone missing in less than six months. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in March while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It has not been found, but the search has been concentrated in the Indian Ocean far west of Australia.
The Donetsk region government said Thursday's plane crashed near a village called Grabovo, which it said is currently under the control of armed pro-Russian separatists. The region where the flight was lost has seen severe fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russia separatist rebels in recent days.
On Wednesday evening, a Ukrainian fighter jet was shot down by an air-to-air missile from a Russian plane, Ukrainian authorities said Thursday, adding to what Kiev says is mounting evidence that Moscow is directly supporting the separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine. Security Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko said the pilot of the Sukhoi-25 jet hit by the air-to-air missile was forced to bail after his jet was shot down.
Pro-Russia rebels, meanwhile, claimed responsibility for strikes Wednesday on two Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 jets. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said the second jet was hit by a portable surface-to-air missile, but added the pilot was unscathed and managed to land his plane safely.
Moscow denies Western charges that is supporting the separatists or sowing unrest in its neighbor.
Earlier this week, Ukraine said a military transport plane was shot down Monday by a missile fired from Russian territory.
If the Malaysian plane was shot down, it would be the fourth commercial airliner to face such a fate. The previous three were:
— April 20, 1978: Korean Airlines Flight 902, which diverted from its planned course on a flight from Paris to Seoul and strayed over the Soviet Union. After being fired upon by an interceptor aircraft, the crew made a forced landing at night on the surface of a frozen lake. Two of the 97 passengers were killed by the hostile fire.
— Sept. 1, 1983: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shot down by at least one Soviet air-to-air missile after the 747 had strayed into Soviet airspace. All 240 passengers and 29 crew were killed.
— July 3, 1988: Iran Air Flight 655 Aircraft was shot down by a surface to air missile from the American naval vessel U.S.S. Vincennes. All 16 crew and 274 passengers were killed.
Source: Agence France Presse, Associated Press
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