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Investigation of the crash site of MH-17 by Dutch and Australian police officers.
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Tuesday, 28 October 2014 - 13:49
MH17 investigation focused solely on missile attack
The disaster with flight MH17 was most probably not caused by an accident or by a bomb on board the plane.
The Public Prosecution gave this information to the Cabinet based on the first results into the circumstances of the disaster.
The Public Prosecution investigated a total of four scenarios that could have caused the plane crash. Now that an accident and a terrorist attack from inside the plane have been ruled as highly unlikely, only two possible causes remain - "an attack from the ground or an attack from the air", ministers Opstelten, Koenders and Hennis wrote in a letter to the Second Chamber.
They also write that evidence seem to indicate that the plane was shot down by a missile. But that can not yet be said with certainty, the Cabinet is awaiting the final reports.
Fred Westerbeke, one of the Prosecutors involved in the investigation, had an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel yesterday in which he stated that it seems most likely that a surface to air missile hit the plane. "Based on the information available, a shooting-down by a ground-to-air missile is the most likely scenario, but we aren't closing our eyes to the possibility that it could have happened differently" Der Spiegel quoted him.
The Russian news outlet RT interpreted the above quote as Westerbeke confirming that there is a chance that the plane was shot down by an Ukrainian military aircraft.