On Thursday night reports came out that 298 people were killed on board Malaysia Airlines MH17, apparently shot with a ground-to-air missile even though it was flying at 33,000 ft ! So who did it, and how to get to a crash site that is in a Ukranian rebel-controlled war zone?
From NPR news : As they try to piece together how Flight MH17 was brought down, U.S. experts are analyzing a recording released by Ukraine’s government that it says is a string of intercepted phone calls in which separatist rebels acknowledge that they shot down an airliner.
However, as NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports, U.S. intelligence has not yet publicly authenticated the recording.
“Privately, U.S. officials say they suspect separatist rebels were behind the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” Dina reports. “U.S. officials say they are still analyzing the audio. They are also using algorithms and mathematics to pinpoint where the missile was fired from.”
The fate of the flight’s “black box” data recorders remains in question. After the separatists said they had recovered them from the crash site, Ukrainian officials disputed that account. And while some reports stated that the flight recorders might be sent to Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow has “no plans to seize the flight recorders,” according to state-owned news agency RT.
The maps are all from the New York Times’s online edition.
