the. world leaders call for an unimpeded international investigation after a malaysian airlines passenger jet crashes in east ukraine killing all two hundred ninety eight on board. relatives of the victims are overwhelmed with grief the netherlands lost more than one hundred fifty of its citizens and the boeing seven hundred seven came down. but. government forces are accusing each other of bringing down the plane here on r.t. international we take a close look at the blame game that's well underway. it's

an international law from moscow with me rule research from the entire news team here welcome to the program today and one breaking news story dominating the global headlines right now an investigation is now on to find what caused a malaysia airlines a passenger plane to crash in eastern ukraine on thursday all two hundred ninety eight people on board the boeing seven seven seven were killed some of the locals who witnessed the crash say they saw bodies falling to the corpses are scattered across an area covering fifteen kilometers the remains of fewer than half of the victims have been recovered so far this is how i witnesses describe the moment the plane came down. i saw a piece of the plane fall about four hundred meters from my apartment when i went to check it out i saw scattered bodies from a distance it looked like debris was falling but as it turned out it was people

falling out of the aircraft. i heard the noise of the planes and thought the bombardment would start soon and i also heard shooting somewhere from above we're used to the sound of shooting here but then there was a loud clap i looked up and saw something falling over me it broke into pieces the main part tile here and exploded although. it was terrible what i saw at first i saw smoke and fire and when the firemen started to put out the flames i saw bodies torn apart there were children too there were bodies attached to see here and there . so they looked abundant but we were swimming and we heard three distinct strong actually not sure it's more like explosions and then we saw the played for all its wing was crawling off and then was so black smoke and that's all. i am a part of the order came down on the four year old my brother is there at the moment there are many people and degree everywhere you found

a ticket from amsterdam to malaysia everything is scattered around it simply horrific so many bodies he couldn't even count them the plane on the route from amsterdam to kuala lumpur was flying over the part of eastern ukraine where kiev continues its military crackdown against anti-government forces it was then that it disappeared from radar shortly before it was due to enter russian airspace the ukrainian president petro poroshenko quickly accusing antigovernment fighters of downing the plane with a rocket calling the incident a terrorist attack but militia groups deny all of this they say they don't have access to weapons capable of taking out a plane at the altitude that the aircraft was flying at a local activists say they have found the flight recorders amid the wreckage. the nationalities though over the majority of people on board the crushed malaysian airliner have now been identified more than half of them one hundred fifty four to be exact what dutch another thirty eight of the victims were malaysian including

the fifteen crewmembers also on the plane nine britons four germans three filipinos and a canadian. let's give you some pictures here from kuala lumpur as families gathered in the country's main airport shortly after they found out what's happened many became angry and demanded to see the passenger manifest desperate for news of their loved ones. the worst hit so far has been the netherlands which has lost more than one hundred fifty of its citizens relatives are now desperate to find out what's happened to their loved ones a short time ago i spoke with r.t. correspondent she reports from. relatives and friends would have gone to bed last night hoping that everything that took place yesterday was just a dreadful nightmare but poland has woken up this morning to nothing short of a national tragedy as you said the majority of the passengers on that flight were dutch nationals not flight took off from here where i am in amsterdam people

airport before it crashed in ukraine and the scenes we saw here yesterday absolute devastation of the devastated passengers relatives just trying to obtain information about what had happened to their loved ones and the grief and the show. coming to terms with their losses it was just unbelievable we also know that a number of the passengers were headed to melbourne print international aids conference with a sense of shock last night but this morning that country has woken up to the tragedy and the reality of that very high death toll from poland. are they going to go to school is now on the border joining us live here on the program a real good to see you in. the situation where you are right now can you give us an update what's the latest that you know. well indeed i am with the russian

ukrainian the border quite far actually from the scene of the crash nevertheless that we can say with certainty that the area where the plane has come down is definitely not something that you would call peaceful it was indeed the site of some of the most intense fighting between the key of forces and the ukrainian military over the past couple of weeks on tuesday as a matter of fact the very location where the most of the plane debris has fallen that was the site of extremely intense bombing by ukrainian military on the ground despite the fact that ukrainian military has issued assurances that they will not be targeting civilian or residential areas and homes in the region nevertheless they obviously seem to have failed to do so. and now of course there's information that flight data recorders at least one of them has been recovered by the self-defense forces a neighbor promising to be on their word to investigators and indeed ukraine has

launched an investigative case into the reasons for the plane crash of m.h. seventeen however there have been increasing calls coming from e.u. authorities coming from the nato secretary general all calling for international investigation of this immense tragedy are going to be is really going to go we'll check in with you soon thank you. now during a phone conversation with barack obama vladimir putin called for an unconditional ceasefire to be declared in ukraine with immediate effect it would calmly has details of the crime and response. the kremlin spokesman dmitri pursuit of told the guardian newspaper that it's stupid to presume russia is culpable for this and also say the kremlin will not make any further statements until more is known about what exactly happened now as you said president putin phone conversation with barack obama has. an immediate cease fire must be declared in

eastern ukraine the leaders of the self-proclaimed people republic have said that they are going to implement a humanitarian truce so an investigation can take place to find out what what happened to this airplane now meanwhile the ukrainian authorities have said that russia may be behind the striking down of this plane now of course russia's dismiss this as stupid and. the ukrainians have to take responsibility for this because it happened over their territory and if there was pace in eastern ukraine then this would never have happened now i think we can hear what president putin had to say about this earlier. we have to do everything in our capability to make sure an objective picture of

what happened is made public and known to people in our country as well as the people of ukraine and the whole world what happened is completely unacceptable and no one has the right to walk away with the making ject of conclusion of what happened first. i want to point out that this tragedy wouldn't have happened if there was peace on the ukrainian land at least if the fighting hadn't had resumed in the south east without any doubt the state on whose territory this happened must still responsible for this horrible tragedy it's very easy to jump to conclusions at this stage now some experts have said that the only people in ukraine that have the capability the technology to down a plane flying at this altitude are the ukrainian military so you know we'll just have to wait until there are more hard facts known to see what

happened to this plane and we spoke to aviation security expert richard blum he told us that while experts are figuring out the details of the crash the incident says more about the dangers of i suppose or having a war zone in eastern ukraine. i think technical experts may have to adoption is in terms of how big the debris how many pieces what's burned what's not. you can make the documents in terms of whether there was an implosion or xplosion on the part of the aircraft but again i think this really isn't the mystery story it goes back to out frankly flogging what is functionally a war zone and there are political issues and military issues and that's with really key here again that it's not a mystery it's really a question of what happens how people are affected throughout the world because of what happened in eastern ukraine. and one after another major air carriers are diverting their planes around ukrainian airspace among them just to name a few air france. europe's transport agency euro control has advised all the e.u.

carriers to avoid ukraine's airspace i talked about this with allergies peter all over in berlin we heard a short statement from german chancellor angela merkel in which she said she was shocked and expressed her condolences to the families of those who have been killed who are expecting a further statement from her in a few hours time that go into a little bit more depth we've heard from a colleague. in. the dutch prime minister has also been expressing his condolences the u.k. where nine people it seems were on that flight nine u.k. citizens david cameron the prime minister there held a meeting with senior government officials to decide what the next step would be what they actually knew about what had happened and then the united kingdom went to the united nations and asked for a special set a special session of the security council now that session will take place in new york later on friday but what we are seeing though is as an outpouring of

condolence and grief here in europe as all care is just about have said that they're going to try and employed all of ukrainian airspace. control who are the european body that monitor air traffic control and to give guidelines and air traffic control of rule eastern ukraine no absolute no go area until we find out anything more about what's happened with this terrible tragedy that's touched lives across europe now the instability and conflict in eastern ukraine certainly makes it difficult to confirm some of the claims and details of keep rushing in and using what we do know however we've pieced together the plane tragedy in chronological order and around r.t. international. at twelve fifteen pm local time flight m h seventeen with two hundred ninety eight passengers and crew on board to call from amsterdam airport on a scheduled transcontinental flight to kuala lumpur. for twenty one pm local time

radio contact with the pilots of the malaysia airlines boeing seven hundred seven stopped and the jet disappeared from radar there was no warning or distress signal of any kind the jet was last recorded as an altitude of ten kilometers of eastern ukraine a region racked by civil conflict infighting within the hour the fate of m.h. seventeen had become clear the jet had disintegrated in the air they breathe from it falling over a wide area anti-government forces arrived and secured the crash site within the hour confirming that there were no survivors by seven pm local time both kiev and the anti-government sides had washed their hands of responsibility the government claimed that they're not carry out any anti air operations while a self defense spokesperson says that they simply did not have the weapons that could reach that high by ten pm ukrainian time fighters in the east claimed to have found the black box the flight's data recorder promising to handed over to

international investigators more again as the r.t. and r.t. spanish correspondent francisco gator he was at the scene of the crash earlier he sent us this report in the wee hours of the morning. the situation in this kilometer that is around is that you can see several pieces of the aircraft and also several bodies that the militia and seek here said that they don't have the capability to shoot an aircraft who is in a distance of ten thousand meters and they were saying that is the ukrainian army forces who shot down this aircraft of my lashon airlines the government open an investigation and is cleared that this accident has important political connotations because it is not just an accident of an aircraft because of the bad moreover it's

a situation that is very important because here very close to the war there in the last days there was a big combat between the militia and and the granny and forces and u.s. intelligence officials are claiming the plane was down by a surface to air missile but have not specifically blamed either side the american vice president joe biden has said that a team of specialists will be sent to assist ukrainian authorities with the investigation of washington with more. u.s. officials believe it was a surface to air missile that shot down the malaysian plane over ukraine the u.s. is not pointing the blame thing there just yet president obama spoke with the ukrainian leader but. we can be sure that the blame game in the coming days and weeks is going to be vicious there are questions as to who had the capability to do this the ukrainian military certainly has the capability a launch like that would require a team of specialists as we hear from many experts and there is another question

why was this malaysian airliner flying over the conflict zone we know that u.s. airlines had been avoiding the area for some time to size me because it was deemed unsafe what kind of instructions that this plane was see from the ukrainian air traffic control and what exactly was happening inside the cockpit just moments before the tragedy hopefully we'll get more answers when investigators get hold of that black box of course one of the main questions at this point is who is going to investigate this the u.n. secretary general spoke out calling for an international investigation one of the concerns moving forward is that the investigation could eventually be politicized the blame game is full on in the media even before any facts have been established and correspondent guy nature can international investigators have not arrived at the crash site yet but the ukraine you know thorough to use in some western media has been very quick to blame the fighters were an important new york now taking us through some of the more wild speculation in the media. a shocking tragedy claiming

the lives of nearly three hundred victims before and investigation even begins the lack of credible facts has it prevented many in the west from jumping to conclusions according to the sun newspaper the russian president is personally responsible for downing the malaysia airlines plane in ukraine and accusation some u.s. officials are doing their best to feel if it is a result of either separatist or russian action sure mistakingly believing there was a ukrainian war plane i think there's going to be held today and there should be there does seem to be a growing awareness that it probably had to be russian serjeant's now how we determine that will require some forensics but then if there is evidence pointing in that direction the equipment had to come from russia either the missile came from it's a missile that came from russia or it was from the separatists and it's

a buccal style bissell i mean this came from russia russia has their fingerprints all over it either way why stop it fingers according to the daily mail russia's hands are soaked in blood some journalists conveniently camouflaged their blame with a question mark headline after headline asking if russia is to blame very few bothering to enquire about ukraine's possible role in the plane crash the new york times on the other hand reported ukraine's accusations leaving no room in this article for russia's position the us nato and russia have all called for an investigation to be launched to establish the facts many media outlets have already created their narrative even if it means bypassing the truth marina port ny r.t. new york. and some of the accusations against anti-government fighters are based on a tweet which was reportedly posted and then deleted from the social media account

of the donetsk people's republic the tweet was allegedly a boast from anti-government forces that they're taken possession of an advanced surface to air missile system capable of bringing down such a plane however in an interview to the ukrainian media here prosecutor general actually denied that another allegation coming from ukrainian officials is based around what they say is an intercepted phone call between antigovernment fighters in it they purportedly admit to shooting down the plane if this passenger jet was shot down there are few weapons in the region able to do so on possible example is the book surface to air missile system several former soviet countries have the weapon including ukraine it has the ability to intercept up to twenty four targets at the same time with the distance of up to forty five kilometers in an altitude of twenty five kilometers in fact it's projectiles travel up to twelve hundred meters

per second as yet there's no confirmation this missile system was the cause of the crash. let's get some more technical side on this and delve deeper into we can go across live to australia and talk to former pilot and traffic controller desmond ross great to see you today thanks for joining us here on r.t. international you probably heard me a moment ago discussing we're hearing there's only one no weapons system available the so-called book rocket launcher capable of hitting high altitude aircraft you're an expert in aviation what do you think you're leaning towards that is a sound likely or. well all the media reporting that i've seen today seems to indicate with some certainty that it was a missile. will. sort through that it could possibly also been a bomb on board the aircraft but when you look at some of the. images that are being streamed around the world at the moment it does not appear to be the case that it has been hit by something externally and it was broken up accordingly. he

did seems that it broke up were exploded very quickly there was no sign of fire on many of the but there's one assessment if i can just jump in quickly here because when you talk about you know what it is that potentially brought down this malaysian aircraft and what we understand is that the aircraft came down between forty and sixty kilometers inside ukrainian borders about fifty kilometers away from the russian border surely though there must be some sort of radio radar wreck ords the could show more about what happened to the plane if indeed some trajectory well did come shooting towards it i'm quite confident that such records probably do exist from satellite imaging particularly in that part of the world at the moment which is under significant surveillance for many authorities and many governments i think at this moment in time so i would be really expecting that somebody whether it's the your ass or russia or some european power it would have been some satellite imaging that would show quite clearly where the missile came from and its

trajectory to meeting up with the air but now it doesn't we are getting a we're getting reports here that a second black box has been recovered unconfirmed reports as you say two black boxes now have been recovered to tell us or tell us how that can help to explain the nature of what's happened here. the the so-called mystical black rocks are actually orange for one thing but first one is the cockpit voice recorder which records the last two hours of all communications and all conversations in the cockpit so that that to ours leading up to the final moments should give us a fairly good indication of what was going on and it may even tell us that knew nothing about it whatsoever that it just happened in the second boxes the flight data recorder which is usually located in the tail of the air and it records all of the parameters i was the aircraft's flight path and its parse it ings its control

settings basically everything that we might need to know about the way in which the result reading that needs to be analyzed by a specialist laboratory to get the maximum value from it and that will give us a very clear indication of precisely what happened in the last moments now desmond we've been showing some very graphic images here on r.t. international there for they've been getting shown all around the world very disturbing images but the one question i have for you as a bit of a bit of a disturbing question to be honest with you is that are the pictures show the bodies that have come from the aircraft the aircraft as it has a dead brief field up to fifteen kilometers across compared to the aircraft the bodies are actually very much intact according to the pictures would that affect your hypothesis of what actually happened to the airplane i mean if indeed the bodies fell ten kilometers from the sky. frankly there's a couple of things that are a little bit curious about the images that i've been seeing on television not not from our personally can't get that here in australia but some of the others. the

when the aircraft was hit and it would have depressurized more innocent mediately if there was a large hole blown a fuse a large or a contact if you slice could help and that means that the air pressure inside the cabin would have gone from a nominal eight thousand feet above sea level which is normally the sort of setting that would be. comfortable for the passengers it would have gone from that to the thirty three thousand piece or sudden decompression of that nature would have been quite calamitous the people who had very few seconds of consciousness and the where they passed through like a breeze a layer a lack of oxygen and they would have fallen obviously a great distance to the ground and so interesting in that they might be quite intact one would expect that that might be showing some signs of damage and the other thing that i found really interesting it is the collection of power sports that are being shown on television which will appear to be very train and almost brand new. and they've been collected obviously very quickly you know over

composite so from should cases perhaps. so there are some interesting aspects to the whole thing we were on going to become i.o.c. investigation is conducted professionally improve the desmond decide this malaysia aircraft was going on a fairly traditional flight from amsterdam to kuala lumpur but if you check its flight trajectory compared to previous flights in the past this one was slightly different is that because of the war zone in eastern ukraine or something else going on here. every flight that departs from any airport in our flight path is determined shortly before the flight but a combination of factors which includes the winds the airlines are always seeking the most efficient altitude at which to fly with the best winds that will take them to their destination as quickly as possible that saves on fuel which is one of the major cause. so there are. so the pilots and the operations personnel would have looked at all of this basic information and the flight may have been a little bit further north a little bit through the size so different from any other normal five minutes

that's not unusual at all if they chose to do a proper thorough risk assessment of the airspace they were flying through they may have thought for one reason or information that they had that it would be better to go a little through the north or south or mary or fly part i don't find any of that particularly unusual it would have been determined by the operations and the pilots prior to departure or at a former pilot and air traffic controller desmond ross aviation security expert joining us live here on r.t. international a great pleasure thank you and i thank you for joining us here on the program as our ukraine's army does actually have some history of shooting down civilian planes believe it or not i mean a caution about looks back at a fatal mistake during military exercises in two thousand and one. case has similarities to the incident indeed it happened thirteen years ago two thousand and one ever told where a russian plane was carrying sixty six passengers as well as twelve crew members

and was flying from tel of based in israel to novosibirsk now somewhere at about the black sea it happened the russian ground control center reported that its last contact with the chance to ask the plane disappeared from the reader and very shortly after it was revealed that the plane went down into the sea of course of the investigation was launched there were conflicting reports and i do remember there was one when the pilots. are meeting in a plane that was flying above pretty much the same area said that he actually saw the russian jad before crashing into the sea in his so how the jet exploded it's the number one reason behind the incident was a possible terrorist attack that's what the investigators first thought but then it turned out that the crash happened due to ukrainian

a missile that broad down the plane and that happened accidentally during military exercises military drills happening at the same time in the world basically this seems area now i have to mention that the ukrainian military forces really deny it quite heatedly that they were at fault however international. investigation was carried out in international society acknowledged the fact that there was a ukrainian ukrainian mist that brought down that russian plane and that happened back in two thousand and one. while the malaysian plane crash was dominating global headlines have taken a turn for the worse in gaza israel has launched a massive ground operation and one of its soldiers has been killed the first israeli military death in this part of the company in which began late on thursday but the offensive has also led to palestinian casualties as well.

i know it well you know very well the lives of the. women in the book. and these images you see right here showing the bodies of three children who were reportedly hit by artillery fire there are among at least twenty palestinians who have died since this ground offensive began now i don't friday heavy bombardments across gaza with locals reporting tanks crossing the border tel aviv says it needs to destroy tunnels being used by hamas militants to infiltrate israel already ground troops up fast by support in the air and navy the u.n. meantime has called for an immediate end to the violence from both sides journalist harry for.