Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Shot Down In Ukraine

MOSCOW — A suspected Russian-made surface-to-air missile downed a Malaysia Airlines jet in a separatist-controlled corner of eastern Ukraine on Thursday, prompting the Ukrainian government to denounce an “act of terror” that killed all 298 people on board.

U.S. intelligence officials confirmed, but could not identify the origins of, the missile strike that led to the deadliest downing of a civilian passenger plane in recent decades. One Ukrainian government official, however, said the Boeing 777 traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur appeared to have been hit by an advanced, Russian-made missile system that recently came into the hands of the pro-Moscow separatists waging a ? uprising in the east.

The Ukrainians appeared to point the figure at either Russia or pro-Russian separatists. In a late-night news conference,Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, chief of the Ukraine Security Services, said his government had obtained intercepts of phone calls between members of Russia’s main intelligence directorate and pro-Russian separatists in which they allegedly discussed shooting down the airplane, according to the Kiev Post.

Images capturing what appeared to be the explosion showed a massive cloud of smoke in the air as the plane was hit about 4:21 p.m. local time. Blurred lines of debris rained down on the ground. Rescue workers plied water over the smoldering remains, which landed in a rare rural patch of eastern Ukraine where the crash site appeared to be a ghastly scene of twisted metal and bodies splayed out in an ashen tableau.

In Amsterdam, an audible gasp went up at the news conference Thursday night at Schiphol airport when it was announced that 154 Dutch passengers had been on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The airline’s senior vice president, Huib Gorter, read out a list of passenger nationalities that included 27 Australians as the next-largest group. The airplane’s 15 crew members were Malaysian, as were 28 passengers. The nationalities of 41 passengers had not been established at the time.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said “a number of passengers” were traveling to the 20th annual International AIDS Conference in Melbourne beginning Sunday, and some of the world’s foremost researchers were thought to have been on the flight. The dramatic loss of yet another Malaysian Airlines flight, after the mysterious disappearance of the same carrier’s Flight 370 in March, sparked a familiar chain of tragedy across the globe, with distraught family members shuttled to impromptu emergency centers in Asia and Europe.

A recording provided by Ukrainian Security Service and supplied to The Washington Post purportedly captured separatists and Russians conferring about the attack. The Post could not independently verify the authenticity of the recording or the individuals identified in it. One voice on the tape — identified by the Ukrainian intelligence agency as Igor Bezler, one of the leaders in the pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern Ukraine — says a phrase in Russian that can be translated either as “we have just shot down a plane” or “they have just downed the plane.”

The attack — denied by some rebel leaders who insisted they did not have the capabilities to stage such a strike — appeared to propel to a pivotal new phase a crisis that has been brewing for months. Ukrainian authorities, belatedly given permission by the rebels to enter the crash site late Thursday, combed through the wreckage scattered near the city of Grabovo.

“We have managed to identify 30 corpses,” said Konstantin Batozsky, an adviser to Donetsk regional governor Serhiy Taruta. “They are scattered in a range of four kilometers [2.5 miles] around. It’s absolutely horrible.”