MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/. Russia’s RT television channel has handed over to the Dutch Safety Board, an agency that is investigating the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine, information about fragments of the plane shown in RT’s documentary "MH17: A Year Without Truth," the RT press service said on Tuesday.
The channel’s producers handed over to the Dutch investigators contacts of the head of administration of the settlement of Petropavlovka in the Donetsk region, Natalia Voloshina, who keeps the aircraft fragments recovered from the crash site by locals to hand them over to investigators. After RT showed its documentary, the Dutch Safety Board asked the channel to help retrieve part of the plane’s cockpit roof shown in the film.
Voloshina told RT that local residents who had returned to their homes after the combat operations occasionally found the aircraft’s fragments in their gardens and yards. "People try to bring these fragments to the administration building because they know that we can hand them over to experts," she said. "We keep these fragments and have informed experts about that. However they have appointed no date when they can take these fragments."
The film "MH17" A Year Without Truth" premiered on RT on July 17, 2015, a year after the tragedy. The film tracks the course of the investigation and features testimony from experts and relatives of those who died in the crash. These people, according to the documentary, complain of being unable to get information about the investigation, which they claim is biased.
The Boeing 777-200 of the Malaysia Airlines (MH17) en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 km (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 onboard the aircraft — 298 people, citizens of 10 states - died. Most of the passengers — 196 people — were Dutch citizens. According to the key theory of the crash, the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air or an air-to-air missile. The Ukrainian authorities and representatives of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk have been accusing each other of the crash. The United Nations Security Council on July 21, 2014 demanded a comprehensive and independent investigation. Russia’s foreign ministry has repeatedly said Russia was not satisfied with how the investigation was being conducted.