by James Tweedie

THE MALAYSIAN airliner shot down over Ukraine last summer was hit by a Ukrainian-operated missile, manufacturers revealed yesterday.

If true, the conclusions of the firm’s investigation implicate the Western-backed Kiev coup regime in the July 17 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which killed all 298 people on board.

The Almaz-Antey consortium, which makes the Buk surface-to-air missile system, said that damage to the downed airliner was consistent with fragments from the warhead of an earlier version of the missile, which is no longer used by the Russian military but remains in Ukrainian service.

Mikhail Malyshevsky, an adviser to Almaz-Antey’s director-general, told a news conference that holes in the plane’s fragments were consistent with a specific type of missile and its warhead.

Each of the Buk subtypes has its warhead rigged with shrapnel of a particular shape.

The company also concluded that the missile was fired from territory controlled by the Kiev coup regime.Mr Malyshevsky said that the area from where the missile had probably been launched was not Snizhne, as Kiev and some Western commentators have suggested, but another place controlled by the Ukrainian government.

Kiev and its Western allies accused Russia of supplying anti-fascist forces in the eastern Donbass region with Buk missiles, which the anti-fascists then allegedly used to shoot down the flight.

The investigators also pointed out that US spy satellites were over Ukraine at the time of the attack. Data from these satellites has never been made public.