The Dutch Safety Board on Sept. 10 described in a strange way their reason for changing the Dutch language version of the preliminary report.
In Dutch the explanation is this:
Op 10 september 2014 is een wijziging doorgevoerd in de Nederlandse vertaling van het Engelse rapport van eerste bevindingen. Van pagina 14 is de zin "De NOTAM met luchtruimbeperking was uitgevaardigd in reactie op het neerschieten van een Antonov 24 vliegtuig op 14 juli dat op een hoogte van FL210 vloog." verwijderd om de Nederlandse vertaling in overeenstemming te brengen met het Engelse document, waarvan de tekst leidend is voor het onderzoek.
In English the explanation above is this:
On September 10, 2014, a change was made to the Dutch translation of the English preliminary report. On page 14, the sentence "The NOTAM with air wide restriction was enacted in response to the shooting down of an Antonov 24 plane on July 14 that flew at an altitude of FL 210." was removed from the Dutch translation in order to align it with the English document, the text of which prevails over the Dutch version.
The Dutch report is not a translation of the English report. If the Dutch report is a translation of the English report, then the sentence in question could not have materialized out of thin air during the translation process. The preliminary report must have been written in Dutch and then translated into English. Further evidence can be seen at the bottom of every page of the English report. There you see pagination notes such as "6 von 34" which in this example means "6 of 34" in English. They failed to change the pagination notation from Dutch to English.
To refer to the Dutch report as a translation of the English report is misleading. The Sept. 10 change to the Dutch report made it less informative rather than more informative. Why the sentence was deleted has not been explained. We know that every member of the Joint Investigation Team (Ukraine, Belgium, Netherlands and Australia) has the right to block the release of information.
In the English preliminary report the paragraph with the omitted sentence is the last paragraph of section 2.4.3 on page 13. If the sentence had not been omitted then the English translation of the Dutch source document would read as follows:
NOTAM A1492/14 established a Temporary Restricted Area from FL260 to FL320 within an area covering the eastern part of the Temporary Reserved Area established by NOTAM A1383/14. The NOTAM with air wide restriction was enacted in response to the shooting down of an Antonov 24 plane on July 14 that flew at an altitude of FL 210. NOTAM A1492/14 was valid from 18:00 hrs on 14 July 2014 until 23:59 hrs on 14 August 2014. The restriction did not apply for flights of Ukraine state aircraft.