MOSCOW, August 12 /TASS/. No damage agents have been found at the Flight MH17 crash site in east Ukraine, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said on Wednesday.
"Our agency has taken an active part in the search operation ever since the Malaysian Boeing (on flight MH17) crashed over Torez. No damage agents have been found in the wreckage, let alone the traces of some concrete types of weapons," the Donetsk news agency quoted the Prosecutor General’s Office spokesman as saying.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said that all the debris, fragments and personal belongings from the crash site had been registered in a manner prescribed by the law and handed over to Dutch investigators.
Earlier on Wednesday, August 12, the Dutch Safety Board and the Dutch Prosecutor’s Office published a joint press release, which said that the investigators were scrutinizing the elements, which, they believe, might be related to the Buk anti-aircraft missile system. At this stage, the experts have not confirmed the existence of a link between these elements and the Boeing crash.
On 17 July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 passenger airliner on flight MH17 from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. Most passengers - 193 people - were Dutch nationals. Investigators believe the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
The Dutch Safety Board is conducting the investigation.
Russia wants the investigation to be brought to the end in strict compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 2166.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called for making the punishment inevitable for the people guilty of the crash after the investigation is over.
"We are ready to discuss possible mechanisms for bringing the persons responsible for the MH17 crash to justice by using practices that used to be applied previously in such cases," Lavrov said.
Russia has vetoed the United Nations Security Council resolution on establishing an international tribunal to prosecute persons guilty of the MH17 plane crash over Ukraine that occurred on July 17, 2014.
Eleven Security Council members voted for the Malaysia-proposed draft. Another three countries, including Angola, Venezuela and China, abstained from voting.
The two-page Malaysia-proposed draft resolution classifies the incident as a threat to international peace and security and provides for the creation of a tribunal under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter in pursuit of a single goal - to prosecute persons responsible for the crimes linked to the destruction of the Malaysia Airlines plane (flight MH17). The statute (charter) of the proposed tribunal, which supplements the draft resolution, demands that all countries should cooperate with the future legal body in full measure.
Russian Ambassador to United Nations Vitaly Churkin believes that it is wrong to classify the air crash as a threat to international peace and security and create a tribunal proceeding from Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.
"Never before international tribunals were established to investigate civilian plane crashes under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. No tribunal was set up to investigate the crash of a Russian airliner shot down by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile in 2001 or a US-destroyed Iranian plane," Churkin said in one of his interviews.
Russia submitted an alternative draft resolution to the UN Security Council designed to support an independent international investigation into the MH17 air crash. The Russia-proposed document suggests appointing a special representative of the United Nations secretary-general to supervise the tragedy’s investigation. The text says nothing about the need to set up an international tribunal. Instead, it demands that persons guilty of the air crash be brought to justice and that all states continue cooperation in this direction after the international investigation is over.