Who’s to blame? Crash probers face struggle
LONDON – To figure out why a Malaysian jetliner fell from the sky, investigators will use the wreckage of any missile found to determine where it came from and who fired it, experts said Friday. That may be easier said than done in the middle of a war zone.
The first international monitors to arrive on the scene, 24 hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 came down, found bodies strewn on the ground and restrictions from armed militiamen.
That gives a sense of the formidable obstacles investigators face in deciphering a disaster scene spread over 20 square kilometers of contested ground in eastern Ukraine – amid a conflict in which both sides have interests that may outweigh a desire to uncover the truth.
“We are in a country that is at war, and that is in a war of communication,” aviation analyst Gerard Feldzer said in Paris. “Everyone is pushing a pawn.”
All 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers aboard the Amsterdam-to-Kuala Lumpur flight were killed in Thursday’s crash. US authorities and aviation experts say the Boeing 777 was likely brought down by a ground-to-air missile, but so far there is no proof of who fired it. Ukraine and the insurgents blame each other.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said Washington believes the plane was likely downed by an SA-11 missile fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists. She said Russia has provided the militants with SA-11s and other heavy weapons.
The UN Security Council called Friday for “a full, thorough and independent international investigation” into the downing of the plane, but that is a complicated proposition.
Under international civil aviation rules, Ukraine should take the lead in investigating an airline accident on its territory. Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, told The Associated Press that the investigation would be carried out by the Interior Ministry and the Security Services of Ukraine, who would work alongside international observers.
It was unclear what access either group would have to the crash site.
A 30-strong delegation, made up mostly of officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, traveled to the crash site Friday afternoon. But at the village of Hrabove, rebel militiamen only allowed the OSCE team to perform a partial and superficial inspection.
While the delegation was leaving under orders from armed overseers, two Ukrainian members lingered to glance at a fragment of the plane by the side of the road – only for a militiaman to fire a warning shot in the air with his Kalashnikov rifle.
OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw, who was part of the team, said he was “shocked” to see that bodies were still lying in the open.
European Union officials said Friday that Ukraine has first claim on the plane’s two black boxes – a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder – which could contain valuable clues about what happened in the moments before the crash.
An assistant to the insurgency’s military commander said Friday that rebels had recovered multiple devices from the wreckage and were considering what to do with them, raising fears they could be headed to Moscow.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had no intention of getting hold of the boxes, and insurgent leader Aleksandr Borodai later contradicted his colleague and said the rebels don’t have them anyway.
Defense experts said the plane was likely shot down by a missile fired from a Buk system, Soviet-era equipment that is in the arsenals of both Russia and Ukraine. There was no previous evidence of separatist rebels using such missiles, though a rebel Twitter account boasted last month about seizing a Buk system from Ukrainian forces, and AP journalists saw such a system hours before the crash Thursday in rebel-held territory.
Feldzer, the air-accident expert, said investigators’ goal would be to “find the debris of the missile in question and determine the trajectory.” Once investigators reach the site, they should be able to discover whether the plane was hit by one or more missiles, and the size of the missile system involved.
But, he said, “that won’t determine who did it,” unless investigators can find a satellite photo or radar records of the missile.
Justin Bronk, a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military think tank, said the United States has sophisticated military satellites capable of detecting a missile launch, but might be unwilling to share its images in order to protect its secret surveillance capabilities.
“They will probably try to liaise with civilian satellite operators to see if there are any who also picked up the trail on infrared sensors so that they can publicly release that data,” he said.
The crash site is vast, and experts said rebel fighters may have removed key evidence in the chaotic hours after the disaster, as they joined emergency workers and local coal miners to comb the wreckage and recover the bodies.
Charles Heyman, editor of Armed Forces of the EU, said missile casings could help establish who had supplied the weapons that brought down the plane. But he said it was likely that the rebels – if they fired the missile – would have removed any missile-casing debris from the scene.
Heyman said the missile launcher would bear ID numbers that could establish whether it was recently supplied by Russia or came from Ukrainian forces.
But he said if rebels mistakenly targeted a commercial airliner, thinking it was a Ukrainian military plane, they may have subsequently fled and taken the missile launcher into Russia.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry released video purporting to show exactly that: a truck carrying a Buk missile launcher with one of its four missiles apparently missing, rolling toward the Russian border. The ministry said the footage was captured by a police surveillance squad at dawn Friday. There was no way to independently verify that claim.
“If I was the rebel chief of staff, I’d have had it taken away, dismantled and blown up,” Heyman said, “and then bury the pieces in a swamp.”
‘A global tragedy’
President Barack Obama, disclosing that one American was among those killed, called it “a global tragedy.”
“An Asian airliner was destroyed in European skies filled with citizens from many countries, so there has to be a credible international investigation into what happened,” he said.
In Kiev, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk vented his anger in calling for an international investigation.
“We ask all respective governments... to support the Ukrainian government to bring to justice all these bastards who committed this international crime,” he said.
All sides in the conflict – the Ukrainian government, the pro-Russia rebels they are fighting and the Russian government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels – denied shooting down the plane. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed accusations that Moscow could be behind the attack.
“Regarding those claims from Kiev that we allegedly did it ourselves: I have not heard a truthful statement from Kiev for months,” he told the Rossiya 24 television channel.
The entire UN Security Council stressed the need for “immediate access by investigators to the crash site to determine the cause of the incident.”
Obama also called for such an investigation, adding, “The eyes of the world are on eastern Ukraine, and we are going to make sure that the truth is out.”
On Saturday, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott echoed calls for an international investigation. “Australia takes a very dim view of countries which facilitate the killing of Australians,” he said.
Obama called for a ceasefire in the conflict between the separatists and Ukrainian forces. At a Kremlin meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged that “all sides in the conflict should halt their fighting and enter into peaceful talks,” according to an official website.
On Thursday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions. But he did not accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and did not address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.
Ukraine’s state aviation service closed the airspace Friday over two border regions gripped by separatist fighting – Donetsk and Luhansk – and Russian airlines suspended all flights over Ukraine.
Luhansk, a rebel stronghold northeast of Hrabove, saw sustained fighting Friday as Ukrainian government forces reportedly retook part of the city from the rebels.
Satellite imagery
A US official said all available evidence, including satellite imagery, pointed to the plane being shot down with an SA-11 anti-aircraft missile fired by pro-Russian separatist forces.
The official said the US detected three separate events associated with the shootdown: the launching of the missile from the Ukraine side of the border, the missile’s impact with the plane and the plane slamming into the ground.
That official was not authorized to discuss US intelligence matters publicly by name and commented only on condition of anonymity.
Power, during her remarks at the United Nations, said Ukrainian forces as well as the separatists have SA-11 systems in their inventory. However, she said the US was not aware of those systems being in the area of the shooting, and she noted that Ukrainian air defenses have not fired any missiles during the dispute with Russia.
The US State Department said the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Transportation Security Board were each sending at least one agent to Ukraine, and perhaps more later, to assist with the crash investigation.
A command center has been set up at the State Department, where officials from agencies participating in the delegation gathered Friday morning for a briefing from the Central Intelligence Agency on the political and military situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment