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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex MG who wrote (144583)	7/18/2014 12:20:19 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

U.S. Says Evidence Points to Pro-Russia Separatists in Destruction of Malaysian Plane By SOMINI SENGUPTA, ERIC SCHMITT and SABRINA TAVERNISE JULY 18, 2014 UNITED NATIONS — The United States on Friday ramped up its suspicions that pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine felled a Malaysian jetliner, asserting there was “credible evidence” that a Russian-built antiaircraft system in a rebel-held location had fired the missile that destroyed it, killing all 298 people aboard and scattering the wreckage over miles of rolling farmland. The accusations, made by Samantha Power, the United Nations ambassador, at an emergency Security Council meeting on the Ukraine conflict, were the first public remarks by a top American official pointing fingers directly at the separatists and their Russian associates for the destruction of the Malaysia Air Lines Boeing 777-200. The aircraft was at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet in a commonly used air route over eastern Ukraine when it was struck on Thursday. Both Russia and the separatist groups have denied any responsibility, and some rebel leaders have suggested Ukraine’s armed forces may have shot down the plane. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has implicitly blamed Ukraine’s government, saying it created the conditions for the separatist uprising that has escalated into a major crisis. But Mr. Putin has not denied that a Russian-made weapon may have destroyed the aircraft. “We assess Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 carrying these 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was likely downed by a surface-to-air missile, an SA-11, operated from a separatist-held location in eastern Ukraine,” Ms. Power said. She also said the United States could not “rule out technical assistance by Russian personnel” in operating the system. “Russia must stop destabilizing Ukraine,” Ms. Power said. “Russia can end this war. Russia must end this war.” The 15-member Security Council unanimously called for a “full, thorough and independent international investigation” into the cause of the crash. Jeffrey D. Feltman, the United Nations undersecretary general for political affairs, told the council that 80 children were among the dead. Ms. Power’s public assertions were substantiated by two senior Defense Department officials, who said Pentagon and American intelligence agencies had concluded that an SA-11 missile, fired from an area near the Russia border, had downed the plane. That conclusion is based on an analysis of the launch plume and trajectory of the missile, as detected by an American military spy satellite. But the American analysis did not pinpoint the precise origin of the missile launch, from which side of the border it was fired, or who actually launched the missile. Ukrainian officials, who have called the downing a terrorist attack carried out by the separatists, have suggested that a different Russian-made system, the BUK M1, which the Ukrainian armed forces possess and which may have been purloined by separatist fighters, was possibly responsible. “The analysts are still trying to get detailed granularity on that,” said one senior Pentagon official. “Those are the million-dollar questions.” There was also still no indication of motive, though most American analysts have concluded that the missile operators believed they were firing at a Ukrainian military plane, not a civilian jetliner. At the crash site near the bucolic mining town of Grabovo, in rebel-held territory near the Russia border, a dispute was emerging over who seized the plane’s flight recorders, which could shed light on the last moments. The voice and data-recording devices that had been aboard the Malaysia Airlines plane were said to be missing from the crash site. Continue reading the main story