A Malaysian plane has been shot down in the Ukraine.

[WeAreEternal]

The flight mh17 from Amsterdam to kuala lumpor with 295 people on board, it was a boing 777.
It was shot down with a buk ground to air missile.
They say there are no survivors.

It's awful.

LtEve thank you for your very insightful and moving post, I think it sums everything up very succinctly .

Oh wow LtEve. That's a very moving and helpful post

This thread started off brilliantly and informative, yet someone makes a statement and the usual names jump up and attack the poster.

You can quite clearly tell from animations post that there was no malice or hurtful intent. Noone knows what we would actually do in such dire circumstances we have an idea of our coping mechanism so from that I gather she posted as above.

This is about 298 who lost their lives as a result of thugish terrorists playing at being soldiers. It is about innocent babies, young children and families being casualties of a war torn country by a dictator no better than hitler himself.

This is not a pity party to make others feel sorry for you,it is not the place to shred others to pieces.

Lets get back to informative information about the current state of affairs with the investigation and be a little nicer to each other.

Do some of you not see that the vitriol towards other human beings causes these wars in the first place.

Says on the mail website (sorry I know it is the DM!) that Sky News have apologized after it shows a journalist going through belongings?!

Is there any fucking need?! :(

I thought animation was totally outrageous. I'd be beside myself with fury if I was In the same situation....most people would.....sorry if there's no anger to enjoy publicly. You can bet your ass its being FELT.

Throwing around words like vitriol, attack and melodramatically juxtapositioning an Internet thread to the seeds of war is ludicrous at best.

I hope that's the case maryz, they said themselves they shouldn't really be doing it.. :(

I've seen on the BBC website that there are plans to transport some of the Dutch relatives who wish to visit the site.

Lt Eve, your explanation has moved me hugely, and brought home the realities of comflict and disaster more than any news report.

I don't think malicious, Maryz, just not thought through. It's easy to stop at one's first emotional reaction and not bother working to the next step.

And actually I found animation's posts salutary - she's not going to be the only person on the planet reacting like that, and believing anger is enough. Sadly.

One British Government source said: “The black boxes shouldn’t be going to Moscow, but they may be a red herring in terms of what they will tell us. They will just show the plane was fine and then it was blown out of the sky.”

That's what I was thinking. We already know the pilot was told to descend, we don't know exactly why and the recorder won't explain. The recording was very odd, if real, as none of the speakers seemed to know what the hell they were on about. I know more about flight recorders than they did, and I'm not issuing orders to military leaders. This part of the story smells of kippers!

This playground-style spat between Ukraine & Russia isn't making either of them look clever, which is a worry given their ability to escalate mayhem. I know Putin is clever (and personally think it was a Russian error,) so fail to understand why he hasn't taken clear control of this ridiculous skirmish. If the shot really was fired by the Ukranians, he needs to find out where they got the equipment from and show that he's dealt with that. If it was a Russian or paramilitary mistake, just fucking own up and send flowers FGS.

Thanks for your sadly illuminating post, Eve.

Morning all. Yeah, I wasn't sure about posting that, my finger hovered over the button for a while. I don't want to purposely upset people, but the reality of a war zone is hard to comprehend unless you've been there. Talking about Bosnia is a derailment, but tbh I can see many similarities with Russia/Ukraine and FRY.

It seems so easy, I suppose it should be easy really. There has been this terrible tragedy, innocent lives have been caught up in it, why wouldn't we be able to just go there and pick up the pieces? Someone up thread compared it to Lockerbie, and I can understand why - a plane has fallen out of the sky and decent people should want to help the bereaved. But it's not like that. You'll have the rival leaders (rival countries in this case) not wanting 'outsiders' come into their territory. They will also not want the truth about the attack coming out - although both will know exactly who was to blame. You'll have locals not wanting to get involved because of reprisals. You'll have other locals bitter that the rest of the world only wants to get involved now the 'rich people' (who can afford plane travel) have been hurt. You'll have the local who has lost sons/daughters wondering why his loss isn't as important, the person who thinks death is the end, not the funeral and the person who clings to hope that missing doesnt mean dead. You may even have the 'owner' of the land the plane has destroyed wanting compensation, or not giving permission for investigators/journalists/families to enter to cover up their own nefarious deeds or to ensure that the crop/animals that were supposed to feed his family aren't lost.

Add to all that people shooting at each other, laying mines and trip wires, discarding grenades for kids to find, committing war crimes and hiding bodies and it's a whole new ball game.

All that has to be accounted for and it takes time. Bosnia was particularly bad for that and Ukraine will be the same. There are still bodies being uncovered there, 20 years on. I hope against hope that it will not be the case for the families of the 298, but think it is likely to drag on for quite some time.

although RT denied it. re the black boxes. (via PigletJohn)

I happened to be watching RT on Friday morning when Rory Suchet announced that one of the flight recorders had been found. I immediately switched to BBC news and they didn't mention it. France24 and Aljazeera waited till later in the day. RT Spain had a man on the scene who witnessed it.

Then again, what do you expect from the BBC? They are, after all, apologists for your neocon friends and tend to not report about anti government demos in the UK. Did you know thousands marched on Saturday to protest against Israel murdering Palestinians? Maybe you didn't see it, certainly not on the Beeb. They didn't even show a protest attended by thousands that started outside their own office.

"You'll have the local who has lost sons/daughters wondering why his loss isn't as important,"

Another good post, especially this.

Maryz I think you know exactly what I mean by it and it is not to continue anything, funny how you picked out that one line of my post. The poster was being far from malicious, and she certainly never posted that the families were doing nothing it is very easy to sit and say what we would do when we have no knowledge of how these tragic events work in the aftermath.

Anyways.

doctor dh was telling me about that protest I couldn't believe it was not mentioned on the news, the media could be showing a positive that the people want to help these war stricken places.

They must feel like the world doesn't care about them, the village of the plane crash will never of seen as many officials. And you can bet your bottom dollar they will be left with the clean up job when they've all gone away.

something that may not be a coincidence, I was looking up what sanctions could be imposed on russia and it appears that the day before the missile attack America imposed finacial stock market sanctions to block some of their main companies from trading, they had threatened the sanctions since march and the day before they were actioned.

Maybe russia wanted to make a point..

I can't believe that Russia deliberately shot down a commercial flight so I don't think it was related to the escalation of US sanctions. (Although the US have definitely used the crisis to put even more pressure on Europe to introduce more stringent sanctions.)

It may be worth noting that the rebels said they couldn't move the bodies until the necessary international permissions had been given. They knew it reflected badly on them (because of the extremely biased reporting) but had to wait for authorisation. They have also said that they have guaranteed safe passage to international investigators but the Ukrainian government in Kiev is saying they can't guarantee safe passage and hence why they have not arrived at the site yet.

It might also be worth noting that despite the media coverage there has been no investigation as yet hence we still don't know what happened to the plane. The black boxes are relevant to rule out any internal causes, and presumably to determine if there are references to the aircraft being escorted by Ukrainian military jets prior to coming down (as claimed by a Spanish air traffic controller working in Ukraine).

I find it extremely concerning that the Ukrainian government now seems to have a wealth of information about the rebels (eg phone calls, photos and videos of missiles, etc) and yet prior to this disaster, they either didn't have this information or chose not to act on it by closing their airspace to civilian flights.

I hope the Dutch do take over responsibility for the investigation. They seem the most independent.

Book

You are overly sympathetic.

The pro-Russians and/or their sponsors have already shot down a number of Ukrainian aircraft. It is entirely possible that they thought they were shooting down one more, not realising that, this time, it happened to be a Dutch plane which was flying over Ukraine.

In which case, you can easily understand why triumphant rejoicing quickly turned to embarressment and regret when they started to realise the results of hitting the wrong plane and killing the wrong people.

Not wanting to go into tinfoil territory but seriously...

What are the chances of 2 Malay planes being involved in such unusual catastrophes in the span of a few months. This really does my head in.

Book, the first international observers arrived at the scene a couple of days ago, and were first refused access by the rebels and then given limited access by the rebels.

That's great news if they have now guaranteed safe passage to the rest of the international team.

"What are the chances of 2 Malay planes being involved in such unusual catastrophes in the span of a few months. This really does my head in."

There's a really good section in 'Bad Science' about the difference between using probabilities to assess the chances of two really rare events happening in the future, and what it means when those rare events have actually happened. (I'll see if I can find that bit online, and will link if I do).

Driedpaintbrush - Agreed, I don't buy it either. 2 777's as well.