Airline Confirms It Lost Contact With MH17 Over Eastern Ukraine
The site of the Malaysia Airlines plane crash near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, on Thursday.
Associated Press
A
Malaysia Airlines
3786.KU -2.17%
plane carrying 295 passengers and crew came down Thursday while
flying over the battle-torn east Ukraine region of Donetsk, after it was
hit by what U.S. intelligence agencies said was a surface-to-air
missile.
The intelligence sources didn't say whether the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces or pro-Russia separatist rebels.
WSJ's Jason Bellini walks through the timeline of the tragedy.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki holds a news
conference on what the agency knows about Malaysian Airlines Flight 17,
which crashed in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk while carrying
295 people. Photo: Getty Images.
Malaysia Airlines said contact was lost with Flight 17 about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border. The
Boeing
BA -1.21%
777 departed from Amsterdam around noon on Thursday and was due to arrive in Kuala Lumpur early Friday. (Follow the latest updates on the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine.)
Ukraine's
state air-traffic control service confirmed the flight had crashed and
said a special investigation commission has been rushed to the scene.
The
plane went down near the village of Hrabove in the Donetsk region while
flying at a height of about 10,000 meters (32,800 feet), according to
Anton Gerashchenko,
an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Ministry.
The
crash immediately sparked speculation about the cause. For months,
Ukrainian forces have been trying to subdue pro-Russia separatists who
seized towns across the region in April and declared an independent
republic. The fighting escalated this week when Ukrainian authorities
reported that one of its military cargo planes and one of its military
fighter jets had been downed in the area.
The
disaster comes as a new trauma for Malaysia Airlines, the carrier
already at the center of a global mystery over the disappearance of one
of its flights in March, another Boeing 777 that went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Footage
captured by locals from the wreckage site showed a massive grey plume
of smoke emerging from a field before sunset. Subsequent images pictured
Ukrainian emergency forces hosing down the wreckage, as well as
passports, tickets and pieces of bodies found in tact near the crash
site.
The war of accusations kicked off
immediately after the crash. In a phone call with The Wall Street
Journal, Mr. Gerashchenko alleged that pro-Russia rebels had set up a
ground-to-air missile battery near the Russian border by the town of
Snizhne.
"They clearly thought that it
was a military transport plane that they were shooting at," he said.
"They were the ones who did this." His claims couldn't be verified.
In
a Facebook post, Mr. Gerashchenko alleged that the separatists had
obtained a Buk surface-to-air missile system that he said locals saw
them parading near the towns of Snizhne and Torez during the day on
Thursday. He said a convoy with the anti-aircraft missile was seen
heading toward Shakhtarsk, a town not far from the crash site, about an
hour before the plane went down late Thursday afternoon.
In
late June, separatist leaders told the Russian news outlets RIA Novosti
and Interfax that they had taken control of a Ukrainian air-defense
base near the village of Oleksiivka equipped with Buk missiles. The
Donetsk People's Republic also posted a photo of the missiles, sometimes
known as Gadfly systems, on its official Twitter feed at the time,
declaring a victory in having seized the weaponry.
But
on Thursday, separatist leaders denied that they had surface-to-air
missiles such as the Buk system that were powerful enough to shoot down a
Boeing 777 flying at such a height.
Sergei Kavtaradze,
one of the leaders of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, accused Ukrainian forces of having shot down the plane.
"The
plane was shot down by the Ukrainian side," he told the Interfax news
agency. "We simply don't have those kind of air defense systems."
Ukraine's president and prime minister didn't immediately assign blame for the incident.
Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered a special investigation into the
crash, as well as the downing of a Ukrainian AN-26 military cargo
aircraft and a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet in the same area earlier this
week.
"This is the third tragic
incident in recent days after the AN-26 and SU-25 were shot down,"
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said in a statement. "We can't rule
out that this plane was also shot down, but we underscore that the
Ukrainian armed forces were not carrying out any actions to strike
airborne targets."
If a passenger jet
was shot down over Ukraine, attackers would have had to use a
sophisticated surface-to-air missile system, not the shoulder-fired
weapons that are more accessible and easier to use.
At a speech in Wilmington, Del., President Obama called
the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 with 295 people on board near
the Russia-Ukraine border an apparent tragedy. Obama said he had
directed his national security team to stay in close contact with the
Ukrainian government. Photo: Getty Images.
Those weapons, nicknamed manpads,
have been used in attacks against commercial aircraft in the past. But
their rangedoesn't approach the 30,000-foot cruising altitude of
passenger jets.
The Federal Aviation
Administration said that Ukraine had advised pilots on Monday not to fly
over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine at altitudes between 26,000
and 32,000 feet—a height that Flight 17 appeared to have been exceeding
before it crashed.
Under a codeshare
agreement between Malaysia Air and the Dutch airline KLM, the downed
flight was also flying as Flight KL4103. Dutch public broadcaster NOS
reported that at least 55 Dutch citizens were on board the plane, based
on early estimates of domestic travel agencies. Relatives of passengers
gathered late Thursday at a restaurant in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport
to be briefed by officials. The people were escorted by security
officers and couldn't be approached for comment.
French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius
said at least four French citizens were on board Flight 17.
Air France,
AF.FR -1.45%
KLM,
Lufthansa
LHA.XE -2.37%
and Air India announced that they would no longer route planes
over the contested regions of eastern Ukraine. The FAA said U.S.
airlines had also agreed to avoid the region.
Mr.
Poroshenko expressed condolences to the relatives of those killed and
said Ukrainian authorities were engaging in all possible rescue efforts.
Russian President
Vladimir Putin
expressed his sympathies to the prime minister of Malaysia for
the crash over Ukrainian airspace, according to a statement published on
the Kremlin's website.
"The Russian
head of state asked to convey his most sincere words of sympathy and
support to the families and friends of the victims," the Kremlin said.
In 2001, the Ukrainian military mistakenly shot down a commercial
passenger jet that was en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk with a
land-to-air missile that was fired during a military exercise. All the
66 passengers and 12 crew members on board the plane were killed in the
blast.
In Malaysia, Prime Minister
Najib Razak
expressed shock and said the government was launching an immediate investigation into the incident.
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