President Barack Obama says a surface-to-air missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine was responsible for shooting down a Malaysian plane.
Kuala Lumpur: Facing more grief, recriminations and international scrutiny, Malaysia has acted quickly to prevent mistakes the country made when MH370 vanished over the South China Sea five months ago.
Amid scenes of anguish over the coincidence of disaster striking a second Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777, government leaders have told a dumbstruck nation they will demand swift justice for the shooting down of MH17 with 298 people on board over Ukraine.
“We will call for those responsible to be swiftly brought to justice,” said Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai.
Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose 83-year-old step-grandmother was among those killed, said he will call a special session of parliament to condemn what he called an “inhumane act”.
But Mr Najib has been more cautious that Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott in blaming Russia, saying Russian president Vladimir Putin told him in a telephone conversation that pro-Russian rebels did not have the capability to shoot down the plane.
But Mr Najib said he noted that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko felt otherwise.
“We have become victims of an intense geo-political clash in the area,” said Mr Najib, adding that Malaysia’s priority is to find “hard and conclusive evidence” before concluding who was responsible.
Malaysia has told Moscow a safe corridor must be established so that disaster recovery teams can reach the crash site, including a team of 40 that has left from Kuala Lumpur.
Forty-four Malaysians were killed, including 15 crew members.
“Putin said he would use his influence to allow the team in and hoped that the Ukrainian president would agree to a temporary ceasefire,” Mr Najib told reporters.
Loss-making Malaysia Airlines, which took months to release some of the information about MH370 that vanished with 239 people on board on March 8, faces serious questions over why MH17 was flying over a war zone.
But the company said in a statement the flight path was approved by Eurocontrol, the organisation responsible for determining civil aircraft flight paths over European airspace.
Earlier Mr Liow fielded a barrage of questions from local and foreign reporters, saying other airlines were using the same route.
“In the hours before the incident a number of other passenger aircraft from different carriers used the same route,” he said.
Many Malaysians reacted with anger on social media when Singapore Airlines posted on Facebook that the airline does not fly over Ukraine airspace, accusing the airline of trying to benefit from the disaster.
Malaysia Airlines, which has struggled to recover from the loss of MH370, said that in April the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) identified an area over the Crimean peninsula as risky.
“At no point did MH17 fly into this area. At all times MH17 was in airspace approved by the ICAO,” the company said.
The company said MH17 filed a flight path requesting to fly at 35,000 feet through Ukrainian airspace, but Ukrainian air traffic control instructed the pilots to fly at 33,000 feet.
Malaysia Airlines released MH17’s cargo manifest within hours of the plane going down, unlike MH370's manifest, which took weeks.
The company also released details of MH17’s maintenance record and said its planes would now take an alternative route across Europe.
Many of the same officials who were criticised for their handling of the disappearance of MH370 now face dealing with the disaster that has deeply scarred the Islamic nation near the end of the Ramadan fasting month, a special time of the year for Muslims.
The front page of Malaysia’s New Straits Times published a photograph of the 72-year-old grief-stricken woman whose daughter and her husband and three children were killed.
“Who killed these families?,” theStar newspaper demanded on is front page.
Many relatives of victims in Kuala Lumpur were too shocked to speak to reporters.
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