A Malaysian passenger airliner has reportedly been ‘shot down’ over Ukraine near the border with Russia, with all the 295 people on board dead.
The Boeing plane was en route from the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday when it crashed at an altitude of 10 kilometers above eastern Ukraine.
Itar-Tass news agency said the airline was downed by a “ground-to-air missile.”
A Russian aviation industry source said the plane did not enter Russia’s airspace on schedule.
Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry, says on his Facebook page the plane was flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet when it was hit Thursday by a missile fired from a Buk launcher, the Associated Press reports.
BUK, also known as SA-17 GRIZZLY, is a mobile anti-aircraft system mounted usually on a tracked vehicle or truck that can simultaneously track and strike six targets flying from different directions and at different altitudes, according to military thinktank Globalsecurity.org.
