Russia: MH17 findings ‘biased and politicized’
September 29, 2016, 8:12 am

Photo taken on July 18, 2014 shows the debris at the crash site of MH17 of Malaysian Airlines near the city of Shakhtarsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region [Xinhua]

A Dutch investigative unit – the Joint Investigative Team (JIT) – comprising experts from the Netherlands, Australia, Ukraine, Belgium and Malaysia concluded on Wednesday that a Russian-supplied BUK missile struck the airline on July 17, 2014 as it was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

All 298 people on board perished.

JIT also said they had pinpointed the area of the missile’s launch to a territory then in control of pro-Russian secessionist rebels.

But earlier this week, Russian authorities say they have radar reports showing that there was no missile launch detected from that area on July 17, 2014.

“No Russian anti-aircraft missile systems, including Buks, ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a published statement Wednesday.

“All the information presented at today’s briefing came from two main sources – the Internet and the Ukrainian special services. Thus the objectivity of this evidence, and hence the conclusions drawn from it, is doubtful.”

Furthermore, both Russian and Ukrainian forces possess and operate the BUK missile system.

In one of the first reactions to the report, Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eurasian Integration, called the findings biased and said they were designed to “marginalize” Russia.

But Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he could neither accept nor deny the JIT report because he emphasized it was just a preliminary finding and there we still many missing details to be filled in.

The BRICS Post with inputs from Agencies