Frans Timmermans has correct his statement. The person have not the Mask on the Face but "only" on his neck. No Fingerprints and DNA was found.

Timmermans betreurt uitspraak zuurstofmasker | RTL Nieuws

http://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/binne...fmasker-om-nek
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/ma...medium=twitter

"Hot shrapnel penetrated the port wing fuel tanks igniting the fuel and starting at least one engine fire."

I think we have not read any reports about the plane burning when it fell down. Neither did it leave any smoke trail.

This would cause a fuel tank fire, not a fire in the engine, which would be getting less/no fuel.

There are zero reports about a precrash fire, when there were numerous witnesses. There is also no forensic evidence of a orecrash fire. Both engines landed in a burn area.

The port engine was substantially damaged by shrapnel and would have stopped functioning quite immediately. Broken fan blade sections were found at Rozspyne (the middle of the 3 debris villages). Ingesting these would stop an engne as fast as ingesting birds.

The centre section came down right way up, as indicated by the lower-edge damage to both engines before they parted from the wing. Undercarriage damage also indicates it was at the bottom on impact. The already ripped fuselage roof tore sideways, depositing passengers on the periphery on both sides. There could have been fuel leaking before impact, but would not have burned until the impact provided a spark. This would not have to leave a deep crater.

According to mainstream information, most of Ukrainian hardware stationed in Crimea, also remained in Crimea. Along with crews. And there was quite some AA stuff, including Buk-s and S300-s..

The warhead itself is known to have the same mass, diameter and length. And it should be of the same fragmentation type.
Therefore a single peace of fragmentation will not tell, from which type of mxl it was carried to it's explosion point.

The idea is that the shape of fragments is different for different missiles, that's how the hacked report pointed to a missile used by Buk M1 and not any other variants.



Russian media augment this letter with Ukrainian intelligence guy saying basically the same things to a reporter on Ukrainian TV.


It all looked perfectly okay from Ukrainian POV - it was a Buk, not a fighter jet cannon that brought down Boeing - until Russians pointed out that only Ukraine has Buk M1s in the area, about 70 of them.


Another thing is that this fragment should be in custody of Dutch investigators but Ukrainians are holding onto it and keeping it secret. That is, of course, if the hacked letter and images are legitimate. So far Ukraine hasn't commented on it officially. There's no reaction from Holland or Malaysia either.

Surely the guilty party denying it must know they aren't fooling anyone? Reminds me of a kid with chocolate around their face denying they have eaten the cake.

The 9M38M1 missile is used by both Buk-M1 and Buk M1-2. The Buk M1-2 TELARs in Russia are in fact equiped with two types of missiles - older 9M38M1 and newer 9М317 (with shorter wing chord), evidenced with multiple photos and videos.

All we know from wikipedia is that it was designed to accommodate those older 9M38 missiles, not that it still uses them. They were first deployed almost 30 years ago, in 1976.


New missiles (9M317) for Russian BUK M1-2 were a significant improvement in all areas and that BUK has been deployed since 1998 - 16 years already. It's not a fact that Russia still uses older, less powerful missiles.


Anyway, these questions should be directed to the author of the hacked letter - he was the one who identified the fragment and mentioned Buk M1. He must have reasons not to include Buk M1-2 as another possibility.

Um, what exactly is new in this piece of news today?
Dutch Safety Board | Investigations & Publication | Investigation crash MH17, 17 July 2014
The resolution 2166 was on July 21, Dutch Safety board began investigation on July 23.

Dutch back at crash site
 

Four members of the Dutch investigation team went back to the crash site yesterday, under the cover of the OSCE monitoring team.
Dutch return to MH17 crash site as search resumes - Channel NewsAsia

Some stories on this will tell you there is fighting still going on nearby. This is not so. The closest fighting has been more than 80 km away for more than a week. The OSCE has been freely moving around the area for weeks and issuing daily reports, mostly of small protest groups facing off with verbal-only insults, or counterpoint commanders alleging shelling which the OSCE could find no marks of.

They are trying to recover personal belonging, the majority of which has been collected and stored by the locals. They may also look for a few damaged sections to take back, if they've identified ones of interest from the photos.

BATHIK

1. There is no proof the hacked report is not a fake.
2. There is no link between the report and the MH17 disaster other than the date.
3. The most important. The report clearly states that the Ukrainian investigators dealt with photographs, not the actual fragment.
4. There is no problem with Dutch authorities to forward the fragment to Ukrainian investigators if all paperwork is done accordingly. They may not inform media about their every step.

It is actually much more surprising that so far just one passenger was found with an oxygen mask. If some of the challenger astronouts were still able to activate their emergency oxygen supply, why shouldn´t a certain percentage of passengers? After all they had almost 2 minutes time...

Luckily all that is captured on video, so one thing we for sure know exactly is that the plane was not trailing a faint of smoke, and exploded upon impact in an impressive fireball. Crater or not, this is one of the rare real evidence we have so far.

Fresh footage from crash site
 

A long (50 mins) video of the main crash site, showing everything from all angles, from 42 mins mark displaying and talking about shrapnel damage
(sorry, all Russian, no subtitles, only this little section has audio anyway, and obvious what they're pointing at).

What stands out is how much the site has been cleaned up. There are a few craters visible (and some deep tracks which were not made by the plane). The engines are now visible with no other debris around them -- they are much more damaged than they seemed in earlier images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt-QIsgjQkg

More fresh footage and from first hour
 

fresh footage taken a few days before the Dutch went back, with someone who was there within an hour of it happening. Interspersed with never-before-seen footage that he took at the time.. English sub titles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5j5Bpa010Q

A very interesting video

The SA-3 Story..
Awacs has lost the Radarkontact to MH17 at 14.52CEST. The Accident happend about 28 Minutes later. So the MH17 was at 14.52 ~450km away from the Accident Point in the Area Tscherkassy. Tscherkassy Distance to Poland/Romania is about 500km. And thats the Radar Range of the Awacs. So Awacs can´t detect Radar Signals at the Area of Donetsk.
dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/025/1802521.pdf
MH17 - Malaysia Airlines - Flight history - Flightradar24

>fresh footage taken a few days before the Dutch went back...

My ears (+eyes) hurt of all that propaganda.
Someone should do clean video with as pure material as possible, from the clips we have from the day of the crash, before the site was looted and parts taken away with a crane & lorry.

sotilaspassi
 

I see a lot of comments from people who have never been involved in an investigation of a plane crash. In order to check for important clues, dead bodies etc. sometimes you have to lift some parts. Due to the fact that these parts are made from heavy materials, there is no other possibility then to use suitable heavy equipment to lift and/or shift the parts. So, seeing heavy equipment on a crash site doesn't mean that everything is loaded on lorries.

Sotilaspassi did you notice the clever bit, effectively even if we did fire it, it is the ukraine gov fault for allowing the aircraft to be there.!

I agree there is a question as to why the airspace was not closed but to say that exonerates us (if we did fire it) is bizarre.

@TeeJoo

I understand the need to move heavy stuff to recover all bodies (photo & document the part before moving, then place the part back after body removing, if possible).

But I've also seen photos of people loading stuff on a lorry and carrying some heavy stuff to a van. (also videos IIRC)

@oldoberon

I agree that after the first airplane was downed above 5km, the whole airspace should have been closed. (14.July the UA plane was downed above 6km) But no-one reacted, even though Ukraine, NATO and Russia all knew it.

New Video taken today. Minute 2.02 and 2.20, it looks like burned Gras under the seats, also 1.32. Does it burn at some parts in the Air?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5ItzoTZBHY

Yes very interesting, seems the rest of the world has already forgotten.

I would tend to believe the villager ladies who said low flying aircraft where in the area at tree top level. Not that I think it was air-air that brought down this airliner but just more evidence of the chaos and fog of war.

Incredibly to think that airliners were flying overhead while war raged below.

why on earth didn't he stop at larger pices and film a part number.frame number etc.

Wreckage scattered that far apart would give some idea of the airborne breakup

I told him via Twitter that he look after STA Numbers..

Spiegel Online - English

Druckversion - Deadly Ukraine Crash: German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17 - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

http://www.spiegel.de/static/sys/v10...line_print.gif
http://spiegel.ivwbox.de/cgi-bin/ivw...5.201257281136
http://c.spiegel.de/nm_trck.gif?url=...tional/artikel
10/19/2014 08:08 AM

Deadly Ukraine Crash

German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17

Germany's foreign intelligence agency says its review of the crash of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 in Ukrainian has concluded it was brought down by a missile fired by pro-Russian separatists near Donetsk.
After completing a detailed analysis, Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has concluded that pro-Russian rebels were responsible for the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 19 in eastern Ukraine while on route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
In an Oct. 8 presentation given to members of the parliamentary control committee, the Bundestag body responsible for monitoring the work of German intelligence, BND President Gerhard Schindler provided ample evidence to back up his case, including satellite images and diverse photo evidence. The BND has intelligence indicating that pro-Russian separatists captured a BUK air defense missile system at a Ukrainian military base and fired a missile on July 17 that exploded in direct proximity to the Malaysian aircraft, which had been carrying 298 people.
Unambiguous Findings
Evidence obtained shortly after the accident suggested the aircraft had been shot down by pro-Russian militants. Both the governments of Russia and Ukraine had mutually accused each other of responsibility for the crash. After a Dutch investigative commission reviewed the flight recorder, it avoided placing any blame for the crash. Some 189 residents of the Netherlands perished in the downing of Flight MH17.
BND's Schindler says his agency has come up with unambiguous findings. One is that Ukrainian photos have been manipulated and that there are details indicating this. He also told the panel that Russian claims the missile had been fired by Ukrainian soldiers and that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to the passenger jet were false.
"It was pro-Russian separatists," Schindler said of the crash, which involved the deaths of four German citizens. A spokesman for the German Federal Prosecutor's Office told SPIEGEL that an investigation has been opened into unknown perpetrators because of the possibility that the crash had been a war crime.

Narobs writes
Disgrace !

All that stuff, including personal effects, is still lying around. Once the winter weather gets to it . . .

Aren't there any international standards governing the length of time that can be taken in collecting up and cataloguing all this stuff ?

><><<<><><><><<><>><><<<><>><><<><><<><><<><><><>>

I suppose you could volunteer, maybe even drive a flatbed there from London to collect debris

Triumph61 New Video taken today. Minute 2.02 and 2.20, it looks like burned Gras under the seats, also 1.32. Does it burn at some parts in the Air?


Also, from minute 2:46 - 2:58 shows the impact crater of large caliber artillery.

Video's 16/10/2014
 

The second part of this video can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAf8PFx3tmY

Ukraine insisted all along that their lost Buks were not operational. What is this intelligence that Germans have but won't share?



Are they really sure it was Ukrainian Buk firing Ukrainian missile that shot down Boeing?


That is a quite a bold statement to make in itself, regardless of which side was operating it at the moment.

Now suppose that one of the satellite images showed the before launch image of a BUK launch unit and a second showed the after launch picture of the same launcher with a missile missing. If the time between images was narrow enough, it would unambiguously locate the point of launch of the MH17 responsible launcher.

We haven't seen the data that Germany has (nor are we likely to) but this type of data would be very conclusive.

If this discussion is degenerating to the point where opinions in the press (of either side) are seriously considered, perhaps it is better that we pause for the investigators to do their work, when they are properly allowed to do so.

There is a wealth of knowledge on these forums, all too often diluted by idle speculation "supported" by the latest theory published by a journalist.
That is not something that professional pilots easily subscribe to.

It would be nice if the founding principals of pprune were actively supported by those who care about integrity and neutrality in reporting the known facts.
The investigation is in progress, meanwhile, conspiracy theorists, and those with "Agendas" are stating their case.

We are not microsoft flyers, or hacks ... we wait for the people we trust to do their work however long that takes.

This is the cultural problem we face here, and elsewhere until it is regulated by professional pilots again. 1000 posts, zero factual content

Fully with Teddy Robinson on this.



Very few official statements have been made and even fewer of those accompanied by evidence. Speculations how things could have happened are rife, however.


Creating alternative scenarios here is as easy as for movie writers to add new plot twists. All we need is a nudge in any particular direction and imagination flies away.

SA-11 complex is very simple and friendly system developed for use in Soviet Army (also in arabian too since it developed with study of arab-israel war and adapted for use here). All components can be detached and changed box by box. Even soldiers can fast repair TELAR equipment (if it is single failure and electronic equipment, not parts like radar antenna, feeders, hydralic systems).
Complex have very good diagnostic equipment on-board so crew can find failure (on level - box/module), officers can find failure inside box and officers of repair service must find and fix failure on-field.
If someone is familiar with Lebanon/Syrian skill in electronics then remember - they CAN use it.
P.S. Despite on any lie or politic game one thing is clear and undoubtedly - missile hit a plane from forward direction.
If that missile is 9M38M1 then only one direction from where it coming - direction from Torez/Snezhnoe because that missile cannot change direction of flight when targetting big slow non-maneur target. It how guidance system work - final piece of metal and cannot be changed with political situation in world or in press.

@Bathik and Teddy Robinson.

1000 posts, zero factual content.

I don't agree. The MH17 thread has factual content. What about the MH370 thread? The facts there could fit on a single A4.:rolleyes: And it will take two years or so before, if ever, the remains of the plane are found. Still the thread is larger than the MH17 thread and growing daily.

Even the pro-russian separist propaganda is interesting, because some eye-withnesses are interviewed.

The witnesses confirm that the plane was spinning (and losing parts) when crashing and crashed on a low gliding angle.

It also states the plane was downed by a Surface to air missile. So no side supports the stupid gun-theory anymore.

Every party in this tragedy has tried to use it for political gain. Even the Dutch, when Frans Timmermans used the 'thug removing the wedding ring from your wife' to gain support. From what I hear, the Russians block further dutch investigative and recovery effort (or at least offer no help). I guess they are still pissed by the sanctions. Internationally, it looks that the MH17 is off the agenda, because Russia and others are needed to counter IS, which is considered a larger threat than the civil war in Ukraine or Russian imperialism.

Despite their claims, without local work in de field, I don't think the DSB can carry out a complete investigation of the 'accident'. One way or the other, fragments and parts need to be recovered. A hangar has been reserved in Charkov for this effort.

Dutch news on MH17 was quiet for a few weeks, but last two weeks showed some developments.

Last week, four dutch workers joined the Ukraine recovery effort for personal belongings and remains. A small truckload was recovered, which will be shipped to the netherlands. Also, Dutch prime minister Rutte had a one-to-one with Putin, asking for support for the dutch return to the crash site. He reminded Putin of the fact that dutch companies helped to recover the Kursk including the remains of the sailors on board, and that the Dutch have the same feeling concerning the victims of MH17.

The German claim is also known in the Netherlands. Comment from the dutch criminal investigation team is that they have the same information and they hint that the Germans jump to conclusions. In short, they want to keep their cards close to the chest, while dutch parlement wants a public hearing.... Different from an air crash investigation, which can end with a 'most probable cause', a criminal investigation should be more rocksolid, because it has to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Think about the effort on PA 103.

At this moment all but 20 victims have been identified, which increases the believe that Ukraine recovery crews carried out their work rather thorough.
However, from at least one victim nothing has been recovered yet. Her uncle was the first dutch next of kin to visit the crash site, searching his niece. He only stayed for a short time, because there is still fighting going on there, especially in the yet unsearched area's.

I will add links later

Has anyone thought that the 20 odd missing are located in the burnt out centre section and Engines, burnt beyond recognition and unless the site is excavated they won't be found.

Here in Ukraine, in one of reports (on television IIRC) I saw part of a skeleton (spine) in a burnt out area. Shown very shortly, just a second.

Patience is a good thing.
 

For Blackbird69, ACMS and Lena, Kiev:
Did any of you receive an email that the identification proces of the victims has been finished? Did they already run out of material to examine?