Investigators of MH17 crash fail to match real damage — missile manufacturer

MOSCOW, September 28. /TASS/. The damage to the MH17 airliner mentioned in the Dutch report does not match real damage and investigators failed to take into account several fuselage fragments, adviser to the Almaz-Antey chief designer Mikhail Malyshevsky said on Wednesday.

International investigators specially ignored three fuselage fragments to fit into the version that a missile from the Buk antiaircraft missile system was fired from the Snezhnoye settlement in east Ukraine controlled by militia at the time when the airliner was shot down two years ago, the adviser said.

"The model of real damage linked to the final reconstruction, considering those fragments that are absent from the final report differs considerably from the model of real damage," he said, adding that the Joint Investigation Team presented no technical aspects of its investigation.

According to Malyshevsky, Dutch investigators almost ignored the technical aspect, including real damage but considered the virtual-reality version where damage areas were illuminated on shadowed transparencies.

"In today’s event the JIT presented the conclusions it has arrived at so far. In the course of the presentation the technical aspects of the investigation were not touched upon. Practically none of them was mentioned," Malyshevsky said.

"As early as in May, when the documents were turned over to Dutch experts, we understood that they were unlikely to be used for certain reasons. That is why the Russian side sent classified documents to the International Technical Commission on July 29, 2015 and submitted the main characteristics, which correspond to a model used by Almaz-Antei. The commission did not take account of that document," Malyshevsky stressed.

Moreover, "the entire model was from the outset built for only one version that the missile flew towards the airliner [i.e. from the Snezhnoye settlement]," the adviser said.

"The full-scale experiment as well as all the previous and subsequent experiments made the Almaz-Antey experts to conclude that the Dutch version of a missile exploding on a head-on course was unreliable. There is a whole number of factors, the unreliable damages in the first place, which prove that," Malyshevsky stressed.

He recalled that Almaz-Antey’s full-scale experiment had consisted in exploding a combative charge near a plane.

"If speaking about missiles, we have information as of the year 2005. There were over 990 samples of 9M38M1 missiles and over 500 samples of older 9M38 ones," Mikhail Malyshevsky said. "The international team has not given a conclusion which type of missile it was. The results of our experiments show that it was a 9M38 missile which warhead has no i-beam shaped fragments."

The Russian Army has no 9M38 missiles on the tables of equipment, he said.

However, a whole number of damages done to the airliner stays outside the area of expectations of this modeling and three important fuselage fragments didn’t get into the final report, Malyshevsky said.

"One of them [the roof of the pilots’ cabin] is not featured in the official report and what is featured is a photograph while another fragment [the left board with the marking] is only in the Internet," the specialist said.

"Both fragments are far beyond the boundaries of the illumination model of expected damages," Malyshevsky said.

The third fragment belongs to the left side of the airliner board and is also absent from the Dutch model, he said.

According to the Almaz-Antey specialist, the missile could have flown only from the settlement of Zaroshchenskoye that was controlled by the Ukrainian army at the time of the airliner disaster.