Vasily Prozorov said
it was his personal opinion and it relied on certain information.
MOSCOW, March 25.
/TASS/. The Ukrainian side was involved in the MH17 flight disaster over
Donbass, a former officer of the Ukrainian security service SBU, Vasily
Prozorov, told a news conference on Monday.
"It is my
personal opinion and it relies on certain information. The Ukrainian side is an
accomplice to the Malaysian MH17 flight disaster," he said.
"The amazingly
prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership was the first thing that made me
feel suspicious. My unequivocal opinion was President Pyotr Poroshenko and his press-service
had prior knowledge of the affair. Secondly, hostilities had been underway for
several months by then, but the airspace over the area was not closed,"
Prozorov said.
In particular he
emphasized the invariable response to all of his attempts to find out the
circumstances of the disaster, for instance, a conversation with General Staff
officers. The usual reply was: "Don’t poke your nose into this business,
if you don’t wish to have problems."
"Some
information has leaked out in the end, though. On the basis of my own analysis
I can speculate who was an accomplice in the crime and who was involved in
concealing evidence. In my opinion, there were two men involved - the current
deputy chief of the Ukrainian presidential staff Valery Kondratyuk and chief of
the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, Vasily Burba."
A passenger liner
Boeing-777 of the Malaysia Airlines (Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala
Lumpur) disappeared from the radar screens over the east of Ukraine’s Donetsk Region
on July 17, 2014. Its crash killed all 298 passengers and crew on board -
citizens of ten countries. Although hostilities had been underway on the ground
for quite some time by then Kiev failed to close the Donbass airspace to
international passenger flights. Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands
and Ukraine created a Joint Investigation Team. On May 24 last year it
published an interim report to claim that the missile launcher which had fired
the missile that downed the plane might have been brought from Russia’s 53rd
air defense missile brigade.
Russia dismissed the
JIT charges. The Defense Ministry said that not a single air defense system of
the Russian armed forces had ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border.
Source: ITAR-TASS
25-03-2019
