KIEV, July 18 (RIA Novosti) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Friday the flight recorder from the crashed Malaysian airline had allegedly been found by local militia who might take it to Russia.
“It’s a shame that terrorists have already said they wanted to hide all traces and take the flight recorder, the so-called ‘black box,’ to Moscow,” Poroshenko said in a statement published overnight.
Kiev has been blaming self-defense forces in the turbulent Donetsk region, the area of the Boeing 777 crash, after reports emerged that claimed the passenger plane had been downed by a surface-to-air missile, despite militia saying they had no missile systems that could hit a target flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters.
Ukraine has several times accused Russia of helping resistance forces in the east, although there has been no evidence to this effect.
The location of the plane’s emergency locator beacon is allegedly 48 degrees 7 minutes and 23 seconds north, and 38 degrees 31 minutes and 33 seconds east, Malaysia Airlines cited Kiev Air Traffic Control as saying Friday.
The company said it had lost contact with a Boeing-777 aircraft en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was in the Ukrainian airspace, following a report from the Ukrainian authorities of the plane crash north of the town of Torez in the Donetsk region. Both the Ukrainian authorities and Malaysian Airlines are investigating the incident.
