Yan Novikov, CEO of Almaz-Antei, has said that if investigative authorities believe that a defence system shot down the plane, it must have been the Ukrainian forces. The weapon used must have been the Buk-M1 system armed with a 9M38M1 missile.
He said that Russia had stopped the production of the missile win 1999, TASS news agency reported. The Boeing 777-200, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed on July 17 last year in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 km from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk self-defence forces and the Ukrainian army.
The 283 passengers -- citizens of 10 countries -- and 15 crew members on board the aircraft died. Most of the passengers -- 196 people -- were Dutch citizens.
He said that neither his company, nor its affiliates could have supplied this weapon to any recipient, Novikov said in a press conference. He says has 'irrefutable evidence' that the Ukrainian armed forces uses this kind of missiles.
He said that the compamy had conducted pre-contract work in 2005 on prolonging the service life of the weapon system in Ukraine. He claims that in 2005 there were 991 such missiles there.
He said that though other versions could have attacked the plane, but said that the the Buk-M1 system and the mentioned rocket were the sole possibility if the plane wasw brought down by a defence system.
Mikhail Malyshevsky, an advisor to Almaz-Antei, claimed that the missile was launched from the vicinity of the Ukrainian village of Zaroshchenskoye.
While Novikov added that Almaz-ready to conduct an experiment at its own cost to prove that flight MH17 was downed by a missile launched with a Buk-M1 system in view of independant experts.
The CEO added that the information from military satellites Washington mentioned at a certain point might help to prove its case. He mentioned that images taken at the moment of the disaster by US satellites "would have certainly provided a clear answer to the question who is to blame".
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