MH17 Crash
Ukrainian Combat Jet Returned
Without Missiles After MH17 Crash: Reports
09:37 23.12.2014(updated 15:57 23.12.2014)
A Ukrainian air force Su-25 combat jet
took off from an airbase in eastern Dnipropetrovsk carrying air-to-air missiles
and returned without them on the day the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed
in eastern Ukraine, Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reports, citing an airbase
employee.
MOSCOW, December 23 (Sputnik) – A
Ukrainian air force Su-25 combat jet took off from an airbase
in eastern Dnipropetrovsk carrying air-to-air missiles and returned
without them on the day a Malaysia Airlines plane crashed
in eastern Ukraine in July, Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported,
citing an airbase employee.
The employee, who claims to be an
eyewitness, said on July 17 that three Ukrainian combat jets took off, and
that one of them, an Su-25, was carrying
air-to-air missiles.
“After
a while only one jet [of the three] returned, which had had those missiles… It
returned without the missiles. The pilot was very frightened,” the man
said. The employee stressed that only the returned Su-25 had been equipped
with air-to-air missiles, and said he was sure it was not air-to-ground
missiles.
The
airbase worker said he remembered the pilot saying “the wrong plane” and
"the plane was in the wrong place at the wrong time"
after he returned from the flight.
The
newspaper interviewee did not exclude the possibility that an Su-25 pilot could
confuse a Boeing passenger airliner with a military jet.
“This
could be. There was quite a long distance, he could have failed to see
what exactly that plane was,” the man said.
The
missiles carried by the Su-25 (NATO reporting name Frogfoot) are capable
of targeting an object at a 3-5-kilometer (1-3 mile) distance, and
to an altitude of 7,000 meters (23,000 feet), the source stressed.
“With
jet’s raised nose, it is not a problem to fix a target and launch a missile.
The flying range of this missile is over 10 kilometers,” according
to the man.
He
further said that the missile is capable of hitting a plane fuselage,
whether directly or from a distance of 500 meters.
The
density of the objects which hit the MH17 was very high, and these
findings did not exclude the downing of the plane by a missile.
“There
is such a missile. It explodes and its shrapnel punctures [the plane]. And
after that, the missile warhead strikes it,” the man said.
The
MH17 passenger Boeing of Malaysian Airlines crashed on July 17
in the Donetsk region, as it was flying from Amsterdam
to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board died.
The
incident is being investigated by an international group headed
by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), its final report is expected to be
released in 2015. According to the preliminary information
of the DSB, the Boeing was hit by “a large number of high-energy
objects” penetrating the aircraft from outside, but the source
of the objects was not found.
Kiev
has accused independence supporters in Ukraine’s southeast
of shooting the plane down, but provided no evidence confirming the
claim. The independence supporters say they do not have weapons which could
down a plane flying at such a high altitude.
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