Amid the latest claims by Dutch investigators that the MH17 flight over eastern Ukraine was downed in 2014 by a missile from a Russian military unit, the prosecutors' statements over the past several years reveal the complexity of the inquiry.
MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, carrying 298 passengers, all of whom — including the crew — were killed when the plane crashed in Ukraine's region of Donetsk on July 17, 2014. The state of occurrence (Ukraine) has delegated the investigation, announced in August 2014, to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB).
September 9, 2014
The DSB released a preliminary accident report saying that the MH17 crew had not sent any distress signals or reported any technical problems.
“The pattern of damage observed in the forward fuselage and cockpit section of the aircraft was consistent with the damage that would be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside,” said the report.
The DSB chairman Tjibbe Joustra said that the initial results of the investigation pointed towards an external cause of the MH17 crash, adding that more research was required to determine the precise cause.
November 16, 2014
Recovery of the wreckage of flight MH17, commissioned by the Dutch Safety Board, began at the crash site on November 16, 2014. The documents on the recovery of the wreckage and the period subsequent to the recovery were published.
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