New JIT Claims Of Russia's Role In MH-17 Crash Must Be Thoroughly Checked - Moscow

New JIT Claims of Russia's Role in MH-17 Crash Must be Thoroughly Checked - Moscow

The latest statement by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which is conducting a probe into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, must be thoroughly checked, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 14th November, 2019) The latest statement by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which is conducting a probe into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, must be thoroughly checked, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday.

JIT investigators released earlier in the day a number of phone intercepts that allegedly reveal closer ties between the Russian authorities and Donbas militia at the time of the MH-17 downing than previously believed.

"This is some kind of absurdity. We are starting to discuss something that still needs to be somehow proved, some kind of expert assessment must be conducted. We live in a world that is struggling with fake news, and we believe that fakes have been published on this topic several times, and then after a month or two they they always got a proper expert assessment," Zakharova said at a weekly briefing.

"The verdict was passed immediately [after the crash], and everything else is just an attempt to find and fit the evidence that would ... testify in favor of the chosen tactics of the prosecution," she stressed.

On July 17, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Ukraine's easternmost region of Donbas. All 298 people on board, mostly Dutch and Malaysian nationals, died. Kiev accused local militias of downing the aircraft, while the militias, in turn, said that they had no weapons capable of downing such a plane.

The interim conclusions previously presented by the JIT, which does not include Russian investigators, suggested that the plane had been downed by a Russian-made Buk missile that could have been secretly brought to eastern Ukraine.