It’s been four months since Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down, and most of the plane’s wreckage is still sitting in a field in a rebel-controlled area of Ukraine. But on Sunday, Dutch investigators were finally able to begin packing up the debris so it can be shipped to the Netherlands. (The Hague’s Dutch Safety Board plans to reconstruct the aircraft as part of its investigation into what happened to the doomed flight, whose 283 passengers were mostly from the Netherlands.) The project, which is expected to take several days, has been long delayed by fighting around the crash site.
Also on Sunday, the Associated Press released some amateur footage of the immediate aftermath of the crash. The two-minute video shows a crowd of villagers staring at a massive amount of smoke and fire and asking if the pilot had been found, apparently because they thought the plane belonged to the Ukrainian military. (The pilots and crews of downed Ukrainian planes were regularly being taken hostage at the time.) Their response seems to back up the commonly accepted theory that pro-Russia rebels fired on MH17 because they, too, assumed it was Ukrainian, though the separatists continue to deny that they had anything to do with the incident.
Meanwhile, state-run television stations in Russia released a satellite photo that supposedly shows a Ukrainian fighter jet attacking MH17, though several bloggers quickly pointed out details that indicate the image was forged. “The channels said they got the photo from a Moscow-based organization, which had received it via email from a man who identified himself as an aviation expert,” the Associated Press reports. In case you forgot, the Russian government has been accused of arming the rebels with the missile used to destroy MH17, though Putin and company also continue to deny any involvement.
