The Russian Defense Ministry asserted Monday that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet was flying 3 to 5 km close to the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 before the latter crashed over eastern Ukraine on Thursday.
“A Ukraine Air Force military jet was detected at a distance of 3 to 5km from the Malaysian Boeing,” said Lieut. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov, head of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces during a press conference on the result of their investigation into the accident.
The flight MH17 - with 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board - was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur before crashing in Donetsk, the Ukrainian city under control of pro-Russian separatists.
The Russian commander demanded an explanation from the Ukrainian authorities on why the military jet was allegedly "flying in a civil aviation corridor at the same level with the Malaysian plane.”
He claimed that the records of the Rostov Observatory proved the presence of the Ukrainian plane at the time of the crash, adding that they had satellite images of one of the "BUK" air defense systems of the Ukrainian army deployed in the region controlled by the pro-Russian separatists on the day of the accident.
Kartopolov said the Defense Ministry will share the related documents with Malaysian and international experts to help throw light on the incident.
Thirty-two OSCE Special Monitoring Mission personnel arrived in Ukraine's pro-Russian rebel-held eastern region on Saturday with the aim of investigating the plane crash.
Moscow-backed militants announced that they found the black box of the plane on Sunday and the self-proclaimed prime minister of the Donetsk People's Republic said they would hand over the black box of the Boeing 777 to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
A further group of fourteen international air crash investigators also arrived in the country on Monday, along with seven more experts with specialist equipment from the Netherlands who are due in the crash area.
The team has been examining photographs sent from the crash site in eastern Ukraine.
Earlier on Monday, Dutch investigators examined bodies from the crashed Malaysia Airlines plane at a railway station in the town of Torez.
All 298 people on board flight MH17 died when it crashed over the rebel-held area on July 17.
The Ukrainian government pledged to do all it can to facilitate the inquiry and President Petro Poroshenko has ordered a halt to military operations within 40km of the crash site.
Meanwhile, clashes between the Ukrainian army and separatists have intensified around Donetsk, with dense smoke rising near the train station and the city airport.
www.aa.com.tr/en
