THE HAGUE, March 20. /TASS/. The Netherlands plan to resume in April search works at the crash site of Flight MH17 Boeing on eastern Ukraine, the Dutch government said on Friday.
A group of 12 servicemen and policemen has been sent to Ukraine to assess the situation at the scene and prepare for resuming the mission at the crash site.
"Specialists will work at the site until March 28," the authorities said. The information that they collect will be used to take a final decision and develop a plan on resuming search works at the crash site, they added.
Servicemen and policemen will inspect the area to the north-west of the Petropavlovsk settlement. Last year, Dutch experts could not access this region due to security concerns.
A full-scale search operation was launched at the crash site in August 2014. However, 130 specialists from Australia, Malaysia and the Netherlands had to suspend the search mission after a week due to security concerns.
Moscow calls for full investigation
Moscow will keep pressing for the investigation of all facts behind and all leads that might help clear up the cause of the Malaysian Boeing's crash in Ukraine last summer, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday.
"We have been insisting on the examination of all related facts and on pursuing all lines of inquiry all along," Lavrov said. "And we will keep doing so not because we would like to see any specific explanation gain the upper hand, but because we want the truth to be determined. This is top priority."
"Unfortunately, one has an impression that some of our partners are interested in something else," he said. "What they are interested in is this: once they have failed to prove that their interpretation of the affair, made public days after the crash, is the right one, the whole investigation should be mothballed at any cost and possibly shelved altogether."
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"Injected information"
Lavrov said that Reuters’ article citing some witnesses who said that the Malaysian Boeing had been downed by militias looks like "injected information."
"The reports published by Reuters are a sort of ‘injection of information’," Lavrov said. "Some eyewitnesses counteracting one another were telling something rather amusing for any specialist. For instance, a wiggling rocket, some kinds of rocket stage separating from it, and a blue cloud of smoke. According to the evidence, the witnesses were capable to see the plane crash while being about 25 kilometers away from the scene and in the conditions of thick clouds."
Flight MH17 crash in Ukraine
The Boeing 777-200 of the Malaysia Airlines en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 kilometers (over 37 miles) from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk self-defense forces and the Ukrainian army. All the passengers and crewmembers aboard the aircraft - 298 people - died. Most of the passengers - 196 people - were Dutch citizens.
In early September, the Dutch Safety Board, which led the investigation and coordinated the international team of investigators, said in its preliminary report that flight MH17 with a Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside. The final report is expected in summer 2015.