 Russian missile maker disputes Dutch MH17 inquiry findings Moscow (AFP) Oct 13, 2015 - The Russian maker of BUK missiles on Tuesday sought to discredit findings of an official inquiry into the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet over rebel-held eastern Ukraine last year. International investigators have concluded after a 15-month probe that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian-made BUK fired from rebel-held eastern Ukraine, a Dutch paper said Tuesday just hours ahead of the official report. State-controlled Russian firm Almaz-Antey showed videos of a BUK missile being exploded close to the nose of decommissioned Ilyushin plane. The experiment, it said, disproved claims the missile was shot down from Snizhne, a village controlled by pro-Russian rebels. Instead they said the passenger jet seems to have been shot down from territory disputed by insurgents and Ukrainian troops, and by an outdated version of the BUK missile that is no longer in use by the Russian military. "The results of the experiment completely dispute the conclusions of the Dutch commission about the type of the rocket and the launch site," said Yan Novikov, director of Almaz-Antey, which has been put under Western sanctions. The firm's glitzy presentation -- which saw reams of slides projected on a giant screen -- was carried live by Russia's state-run media. It is expected to form a central plank of Moscow's rebuttal to the report from the international inquiry. "Today we can definitively say that if the Boeing was shot down by a BUK missile system then it was hit by a 9M38 from the area of Zaroshchenske village," company official Mikhail Malyshevsky said. This older missile is banned from use by Russian military as its expiration date passed in 2011, the company said. The firm in July suggested the missile could have been the 9M38M1 model, which is a later version of the weapon. But tests now proved that the earlier type was used, it said on Tuesday. Other theories floated by Russia over the past year included usage of an air-to-air rocket, possibly Israeli-made, launched by a Ukrainian plane. All 298 people -- some two-thirds of whom were Dutch -- aboard the doomed Boeing-777 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed when it was blown out of the air over rebel-held east Ukraine on July 17 2014. Ukraine and its allies in the West have consistently accused rebels for downing the jet with a BUK missile system that was likely supplied by Russia, which Moscow denies.
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The BUK missile system blamed for shooting down flight MH17 over east Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, is an anti-aircraft weapon whose origins date back to the Soviet era.
The system is designed to be a mobile surface-to-air system able to engage multiple targets at a variety of ranges.
BUK -- which means "Beech" in Russian -- first fully entered service with the Red Army in 1980, and has been exported to many countries, including North Korea and Syria. NATO's official designation for it is the SA-11 Gadfly.
The system fires a single-stage 700-kilogramme (1,500-pound) missile whose warhead explodes in close proximity to the target, shredding it with high-velocity shrapnel.
Up to six BUK missiles can be fired simultaneously from a launch vehicle -- usually either a military truck or a tank -- on targets flying on different bearings, according to the London-based Jane's defence and intelligence group.
The missiles lock onto targets using a separate radar system that is usually operated from an accompanying mobile unit.
The system can operate in any weather and reportedly hit some targets at an altitude of 25 kilometres (15 miles) or more.
The findings from the Dutch-led investigation released in the Netherlands Tuesday said the Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 was "struck by a 9N314M warhead as carried on a 9M38-series missile and launched by a BUK missile system".
The aircraft was flying at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet (about 10 kilometres).
The 15-month international probe narrowed the location from which the missile was fired to an area of "about 320 square kilometres" (123 square miles) in part of eastern Ukraine where pro-Russian rebels were battling Ukrainian forces. It did not say who fired the missile.
Ukraine and its Western allies have accused the insurgents of shooting down the plane with a BUK system likely supplied by Russia.
Russia and the separatists deny this, countering that the rebels did not possess such weapons and pointing the finger of blame at Kiev's forces.
The Russian state-controlled manufacturer of the BUK system Almaz-Antey on Tuesday said that if the plane was downed by a missile then it had to be the 9M38 model that was produced until 1986 and went out of service in Russia in 2011, but is still likely in Ukraine's stockpiles.
The company had earlier claimed that the missile could only have been the more modern 9M38M1 version that was discontinued in 1999.
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