Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Latest News: Dutch Government Wants Evidence From Russia and USA
Russia's Defense Ministry has been insistent in its military monitoring data that allegedly claims that the Malaysian Airlines MH17 flight was shot down by a Ukrainian military aircraft which was tracking and flying close to the passenger aircraft at the time of the tragedy.
The Malaysian passenger aircraft crashed in July, killing almost 300 people, while traversing an standard route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Despite the Russian claims, Dutch prosecutors have said that a ground-to-air missile attack is more likely to have been the cause of the tragedy, rather than what Russia has claimed.
Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke told German newsmagazine Der Spiegel that the Dutch government was "preparing a request" to Moscow to disseminate the information they used to pin down the Ukrainian airforce involvement.
"Based on the information available, a shooting-down by a ground-to-air missile is the most likely scenario, but we aren't closing our eyes to the possibility that it could have happened differently," Westerbeke said. "We are preparing a request to Moscow for information ... including the radar data with which the Russians wanted to prove that a Ukrainian military jet was nearby."
Westerbeke also called on the U.S. government to release essential data needed for the investigation.
"We remain in contact with the United States in order to receive satellite photos," he told German media outlets.
The international investigation is being led by the Dutch because nearly two-thirds of the victims of the missing Boeing 777 were from the Netherlands.
Their preliminary report in September suggested that the plane crashed due to structural damage from outside.
