Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Hit by High Energy Objects, Says Dutch Report

By Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor 

Air accident investigators probing the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine said Tuesday that high-energy objects struck the Boeing 777 and caused the plane to break apart midflight

"The initial results of the investigation point towards an external cause of the MH17 crash," Tjibbe Joustra, chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, said in releasing an interim report. The report is the first official publication on the cause of the incident. The Dutch group is leading the probe that also involves representatives from the U.S., U.K. and International Civil Aviation Organization.

There is no evidence of a technical fault, the report said. The plane's pilots issued no distress call, according to investigators, and their last communication with air-traffic controls, involving routine acknowledgment of a route change, occurred about seven seconds before the onboard recorders stopped working.

The Boeing 777 was brought down on July 17 while flying at 33,000 feet from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur killing all 298 people onboard. The U.S. and Ukraine accuse Russian separatist rebels of shooting down the plane with a sophisticated antiaircraft missile. Russia denies its allies were involved.

The incident escalated western efforts to impose sanctions on Russia for its involvement in Ukraine. Russia has imposed retaliatory sanctions and said it may bar western airlines for using its airspace on heavily trafficked flights to Asia.

Accident investigators have said they would not seek to establish culpability. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on Saturday said intelligence reports on the downing of the plane are "pretty conclusive."

The Dutch-led group said the jetliner was "pierced in numerous" places. "The pattern of damage to the aircraft fuselage and the cockpit is consistent with that which may be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside," the board said. The findings are consistent with a missile strike. A missile warhead creates shrapnel to destroy its target.

The objects that struck the plane are likely to have led to a loss of structural integrity of the Boeing 777 and an in-flight break up, the board said. "This also explains the abrupt end to the data registration on the recorders, the simultaneous loss of contact with air traffic control and the aircraft's disappearance from radar," it said in the report.

The final report is due to be published within a year of the accident, the board said, adding it expected more evidence to become available.

Write to Robert Wall at [e-mail] and Andy Pasztor at [e-mail]

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