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![The US and Malaysia are sending crash experts to eastern Ukraine to investigate how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was downed [Xinhua]](http://thebricspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/230327413_8-e1405634076471.jpg)
The US and Malaysia are sending crash experts to eastern Ukraine to investigate how Malaysian Airlines MH17 was downed [Xinhua]
Malaysian Airlines MH17 Boeing 777 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it went off radar in eastern Ukraine, some 50km from the Russian border. It was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew.
“Obviously, the state over whose territory it happened bears responsibility for this terrible tragedy,” Putin said in comments carried by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass.
“This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace on this land, if military action in the southeast of Ukraine had not been resumed,” he added.
His remarks came as the Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement saying that the airliner was flying beyond Moscow’s air defense “capabilities”.
Meanwhile, Itar-Tass and Interfax cited an unnamed source claiming that the Ukrainian military had just days ago moved the advanced Buk missile defense system to the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian separatists had hunkered down for a last stand.
But Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashenko earlier said that the Malaysian Airlines flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet was downed by a missile fired from a Buk launcher.
The Buk missile system is mobile and was developed as a Soviet-era precision anti-aircraft weapon.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that his forces had nothing to do with the downing of the plane but called it “a terrorist act”.
He said the government in Kiev would launch an investigation.
Meanwhile, an unnamed senior source has told CNN that US radar systems had confirmed that a missile had locked on to a target and then registered a heat signature at the time the plane was believed to have been hit.
The source said US military analysts were trying to determine the missile’s trajectory. Washington says it is sending crash experts to eastern Ukraine.
Malaysian authorities, on the other hand, has called for an international team of crash analysts to be included in the investigation.
Source: Agencies
20:39 GMT:
The UN Security Council plans to hold an emergency meeting over the shooting down of Malaysian airliner in Ukraine, and the deteriorating situation in the country. The meeting was called in by the UK, Itar-tass reports.
