MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. The international commission investigating the MH17 crash wants to mislead the public by deliberately delaying investigation deadlines, Oleg Storchevoy, Deputy Head of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, said on Tuesday.
Some media reports earlier said that primary radar data the Russian side submitted to the international commission investigating the disaster cannot be decoded, while its format does not meet international requirements.
"I want to say that no international requirements exist for the list of such data and the format of their recording. The international organization ICAO recommends involving specialists and equipment developers during a probe to decode information and obtain objective data," Storchevoi said, commenting on media reports.
"We have repeatedly pointed to attempts to deliberately delay the investigation deadlines during the technical commission's work and brought to the attention of the public that delaying the deadlines is the desire by the Dutch commission to deliberately mislead the public," Storchevoy said.
Russia has received no requests for assistance in studying and interpreting Russian radars’ data, Storchevoi said.
"One cannot but feel surprise over the fact it took the Dutch side more than three months to identify the problem. We shared the data back last year. This is a purely technical issue and joint efforts could have resolved it at once. There have been no requests from the Dutch side for delegating our specialists to provide assistance. It is likewise amazing the very statement they are unable to read our data was wade to the mass media, and not to Russia," Storchevoi said.
A passenger Boeing-777 jet of the Malaysian Airlines (Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala-Lumpur) was shot down above the eastern Donetsk Region on July 17, 2014. All 283 passengers and 15 crew - citizens of ten countries - died in the disaster. The strike of a ground-to-air or air-to-air missile was named as a possible cause of the crash.