MH17 could not have been downed by missile fired from Snizhne - Russia's leading air defense company
MOSCOW. July 17 (Interfax-AVN) - Specialists from Almaz-Antey, Russia's leading manufacturer of air defense systems, are continuing to investigate the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) crash over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 and have concluded that the plane could not have been downed by a missile fired from the community of Snizhne, the Almaz-Antey press service said.
"The Almaz-Antey Concern is continuing to investigate the possible causes of the crash of the Malaysian Boeing that took place in Ukraine in July 2014. At the present time, concern specialists have received new data based on supercomputer modeling carried out taking into consideration real characteristics of the Buk-M1 air defense system. The new analysis results once again prove that the theory of a missile having been fired from the area around the community of Snizhne is inconsistent," says the statement shared with Interfax on Friday.
"This theory doesn't stand up to criticism, as the conditions of the plane's encounter with the missile do not match the damage pattern on the fragments of the Malaysian Boeing's fuselage and go against proximity fuse operation algorithms and characteristics of a fragment cloud produced by a missile's warhead," it said.
"In light of this, the management of the Almaz-Antey Air Defense Concern OJSC reaffirms its readiness to carry out a natural experiment involving the detonation of a 9N314M warhead of a 9M38M1 missile near the fuselage of a decommissioned plane analogous to the one that crashed in the sky over Ukraine on July 17, 2014 [MH17]," it said.
"We are sure that the results of such an experiment would once again prove that the conclusions that we made based on an investigation conducted by concern specialists were right and would provide definitive answers to all questions regarding the missile type and the coordinates of the area from which it was launched," the statement quotes Almaz-Antey CEO Yan Novikov as saying.
Novikov pointed out that Almaz-Antey specialists had earlier carefully analyzed information provided by the international commission investigating the MH17 crash.
"The relevant investigation that we have conducted and the publication of its results are related to the illegitimate imposition of sanctions on the Almaz-Antey Air Defense Concern associated with the tragedy surrounding the passenger plane downed in southeastern Ukraine," Novikov said.