REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, THE HAGUE/GRABOVO - Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 broke apart over Ukraine due to impact from a large number of fragments, the Dutch Safety Board said on Tuesday, in a report that Malaysia's prime minister and several experts said suggested it was shot down from the ground.
"The preliminary report suggests that high energy objects penetrated the aircraft and led it to break up midair," Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said in a statement. "This leads to the strong suspicion that a surface-to-air missile brought MH17 down, but further investigative work is needed before we can be certain," he added.
Yet, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said it was still too early to assign blame: "We need to be careful not to draw conclusions too quickly," he told journalists. "Step-by-step, the experts are working to reach irrefutable conclusions."
The crash over pro-Russian rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine on July 17 killed 298 people, two thirds of them from the Netherlands. Ukraine and Western countries accuse the rebels of shooting it down with an advanced, Russian-made missile. The main rebel leader repeated earlier assertions that his forces did not possess such weapons.
The report said MH17 crashed due to a "large number of high-energy objects" penetrating the fuselage. "There are no indications that the MH17 crash was caused by a technical fault or by actions of the crew," it said.
Although the report did not mention a missile, impact with a large number of fragments would be consistent with a "proximity" warhead, designed to explode in the air and hurl shrapnel at its target, said Tim Ripley, a defense analyst with Jane's Defense Weekly magazine.
Such warheads can be fitted to a number of missiles, including the Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile that Ukraine and Western allies, including the United States, say was fired by separatists who probably hit the airliner by accident.
"It's consistent with a hit by a ground missile," said Joris Melkert, a lecturer in aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Delft. "What could cause a pattern of high velocity particles 10 kilometers up in the sky? As far as I can see, the only thing that could do that is a rocket," he said. "The report finds there were only three other aircraft in the vicinity: two Boeing 777s and one Airbus A330, so both civilian, which makes the surface-to-air missile more likely."
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