The BBC reported that Navi Pillay, the commissioner for human rights for the United Nations said in a statement at a conference in Geneva that the shooting down of the Malaysian Airliner, MH17 could be classified and will be further investigated as a possible war crime. The U.N. spokesperson explained that such a classification is possible because of the deaths of 298 civilians over Ukraine.
There are still heavy debates going on regarding who is actually responsible for the downing of this commercial airline. The confusion arises from the fact that the plane was shot down over an area in Ukraine where many pro-Russian rebels are known to be active. Right now the Ukrainian government and the rebels are blaming each other for the deaths of almost 300 civilians.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s security council, announced that an analysis of the black box that was discovered at the site of the crash, that they discovered that a large explosion had caused the plane fall. There is a high chance that the airliner was severely damaged by shrapnel from a missile. Although the Ukrainian government and most of the international community is blaming the pro-Russian rebels for the incident, a representative from the rebel group explained that their organization does not hold any Buk missiles which would have been capable of causing mid-air explosions that would have damaged the plane enough.
BBC also reported that the U.S. has released a number of satellite images that showed that indicate the Russian military has fired missiles toward Ukrainian armed forces. This means that Russia could have been directly involved in the downing of MH17.
The MH17 airliner was shot down on the 17th of July. The plane was originally planned to leave Armsterdam, Holland to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with 298 passengers who were mostly Dutch and including one Dutch-US citizen.
