MH17 Wreckage Reconstructed As Crash Investigators Blame Buk Missile Strike

A partial-reconstruction of flight MH17 has been unveiled by investigators who say the plane was hit by a Russian-made missile.

The Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down in July 2014 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passenger on board.

DSB chairman Tjibbe Joustra

The Dutch Safety Board, which today published its report, reconstructed a 20 metre-long version of the plane, with pilots’ seats remounted in the cockpit.

The wreckage was revealed ahead of a press conference at the Gilze-Rijen Air Base in the Netherlands

MH17 has been partially reconstructed (Dutch Safety Board)

The ghostly reconstruction, which you can see above and below, took several months to complete, and has allowed investigators to understand better how the plane crashed.

Investigators have been working on the report for more than a year (Dutch Safety Board)

Each part of the plane recovered from the site was meticulously labelled in the wake of the crash, with the most “relevant” parts later put together.

While the report concludes that the plane was shot down, it does not say who fired the missile. It does, however, say that Ukrainian airspace should have been shut off.

DSB chairman Tjibbe Joustra said on the day MH17 was hit, 160 planes had flown over eastern Ukraine and three other commercial airliners were in the same area.

The report did not attribute blame (Dutch Safety Board)

“Every single one of those operators thought that was safe,” he said, adding that lessons should be learnt from the disaster.

According to the report, the warhead exploded to the left of the cockpit, causing it to break off as it was showered with fragments of metal.

MH17 was shot down in July 2014 (Dutch Safety Board)

The plane – a Boeing 777 – broke up in mid-air after being hit by a Buk surface-to-air missile, the Dutch Safety Board found.

There were 10 Britons on board the Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

The plane broke up in mid-air after being hit by a Buk surface-to-air missile (Dutch Safety Board)