Rutte (centre), Timmermans (right) and Dutch Minister of Safety and Justice Ivo Opstelten give a press conference yesterday at the ministry of safety and justice in The Hague, a day after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine.
AFP/Reuters/The Hague
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte yesterday vowed “not to rest” in tracking down those responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 if it emerges it was attacked.
The Netherlands has dispatched Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans and a team of forensic experts to Ukraine to probe the disaster, in which 189 Dutch citizens died.
A total of 298 people were killed in Thursday’s crash, many of them holiday-makers bound for destinations in Asia or scientists on their way to Melbourne for the 20th International Aids Conference.
“Let me be crystal-clear about this,” a visibly angry Rutte told reporters in The Hague. “Should it emerge that it was an attack, I will personally see to it that the perpetrators are brought to justice.”
“We will not rest until they have been brought to book,” said Rutte, adding: “We owe it to the victims and their families.”
The Dutch prime minister said he had spoken to a number of world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, about the incident “and just a short while ago by telephone to (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin”.
“He too assured me that Russia insists on a complete, international and independent investigation,” Rutte said.
A Dutch team of forensic investigators left for Ukraine with Timmermans yesterday evening, a ministry spokesman told AFP shortly after 1700 GMT.
Earlier the foreign minister said he would accompany the team to “negotiate free access to the area in order for the experts to do their jobs”.
The crash is the Netherlands’ second-worst air disaster to date.
The worst was in 1977 when 238 Dutch citizens died at Tenerife in the Canary Islands when two Boeing 747s collided, killing 582 people.
The Dutch nation mostly mourned the 189 citizens lost in the Ukrainian air disaster in sorrow rather than anger yesterday.
In a country which values restraint and avoids public displays of strong emotion, politicians and media stuck largely to reflecting sombrely on those who died when the Malaysian jet came down on Thursday, including some noted citizens.
While Dutch and world leaders demanded an international investigation into the crash over the conflict zone of eastern Ukraine, the nation steered clear of rapidly accusing any of the sides of shooting the jet down.
Leaders of the pro-Russian rebels’ self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” have denied involvement and said a Ukrainian air force jet brought down the intercontinental flight.
Rutte also played down any expectations that the Netherlands would immediately be pushing for tougher European Union economic sanctions against Russia or the Ukrainian separatists.
“If I bang my fist against the table now ... then I reduce the chances of the Netherlands and all those who support us getting the facts on the table,” he told a news conference in The Hague.
A Dutch official close to the investigation told Reuters that Rutte’s approach was to be cautious in his wording “in contrast to some foreign leaders”.
The official did not name the leaders, although US Vice-President Joe Biden said the downing of the airliner apparently was “not an accident” and that it was “blown out of the sky”.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that if the crash had been due to a deliberate act, then “it is an unspeakable crime”.
Dutch media stuck largely to factual news that avoided apportioning blame.
National television broadcast live from outside the Dutch embassy in Kiev, showing a carpet of flowers laid by Ukrainians in sympathy.
It also showed a smaller spread on the steps of the country’s embassy in Moscow.
One accompanying note carried an Orthodox Christian cross and the one-word message in English: “Sorry”.
Flags were at half-mast across the Netherlands, and King Willem-Alexander and his Argentinian wife were among the prominent public figures who signed a book of condolence.
Among the victims were a large contingent of researchers heading to an international Aids conference in the Australian city of Melbourne (see accompanying report).
Joep Lange, considered one of Europe’s leading Aids experts, was aboard the flight, accompanied by his long-time collaborator and partner Jacqueline van Tongeren.
A member of the upper house of parliament, senator Willem Witteveen, was also on the flight, the Dutch news agency ANP reported.
In the French city of St Etienne, riders of the Dutch Belkin team observed a minute’s silence and wore black arm bands before yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France cycle race.
At Schiphol Airport, life returned to normal with passengers checking in for yesterday’s flight MH17 to Kuala Lumpur. Some expressed nervousness before the journey.
“I guess I will go with my gut feeling,” said Angela Molina, as she and her son Tristan waited to fly reluctantly to Melbourne via Kuala Lumpur.
“I don’t want to go on ... He doesn’t want to go on either,” she said of her son.
Pro-Kremlin media pushes Putin’s case over downed plane
Reuters/Moscow
Some said Ukrainian jet fighters tailed the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17; others speculated that Kiev’s forces mistook it for Vladimir Putin’s Russian presidential jet.
But while Russia’s pro-Kremlin media offered varying accounts of how the Boeing 777 may have been brought down, they agreed on who was responsible: the Ukrainian government.
For Moscow, Kiev and pro-Russian separatist rebels alike, the information war to sway public opinion over who is to blame for Thursday’s disaster will be crucial to how the crisis in eastern Ukraine develops.
Hours after the crash that killed 298 people, Putin pointed the finger of blame at his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko, saying that it would not have happened if Kiev had not ended a ceasefire with the separatists.
Since then, reporting from Russia’s tightly-controlled media, which has favoured the rebels throughout the conflict, has largely supported Putin’s conclusions, sharply diverging from Western coverage of the tragedy.
Russian media drew parallels with a Russian passenger jet carrying 78 people which was mistakenly shot down by the Ukrainian military in 2001 as it flew over the Black Sea.
An aviation source cited by Kremlin-owned news outlet RT also pushed the idea that Ukrainian forces may have fired a rocket at the Malaysian Boeing, mistaking it for Putin’s jet returning from a summit in Brazil.
“The contours of the airplanes are in general similar, the linear dimensions are also very similar and regarding the colouring, from a sufficiently long distance, they are practically identical,” the source said.
As is often the case with pro-Kremlin news outlets, the narrative could not be more different from the one reported by Western media, which RT television criticised for “unleashing a post-crash factless blame game against Russia”.
Any indication that the rebels shot down the plane with weapons seized either from Russian or Ukrainian stockpiles could raise pressure for stronger action against Russia.
Russia’s LifeNews online outlet carried a slightly different account, saying that witnesses had seen a Ukrainian fighter jet behind the Malaysian airliner, which was flying at an altitude of 10km (32,800 feet) – so high it would be barely visible from the ground.
Russian news reports supported their arguments with the alleged Twitter feed of a Spaniard believed to work as an aviation dispatcher at Kiev’s Borisypil airport.
“Two Ukrainian jet fighters were noticed next to the airplane before it disappeared from the radar, all of three minutes beforehand,” the alleged dispatcher was quoted as saying by Interfax and pro-Russian Twitter accounts.
On Thursday the cited account @Spainbuca had been deleted.
Kiev is staging an information counterattack.
Officials accused the rebels of using a Soviet-era SA-11 missile system acquired from Russia – offering evidence that they may have believed they were firing on a Ukrainian military aircraft.
The government released recordings that it said were of Russian intelligence officers discussing the shooting down of an aircraft by rebels they were supporting.
“Hell,” says one of those being recorded. “It’s almost 100 percent certain that it’s a civilian plane. Bits were falling in the streets ... Bits of seat, bodies.”
The separatists in Donetsk, near where the plane went down, boasted to Russian newswire Itar-Tass last month of having gained an SA-11 Buk, which is believed to have shot down the Boeing.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview on state television that Kiev was spinning the facts and trying to deceive the international community over what was happening in eastern Ukraine.
“A stream of falsehoods is flowing out of Kiev regarding what is happening,” said Lavrov, “They are accusing everyone and everything except for themselves.”
