US Says Rebels Downed MH17 Plane 'by Mistake'
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - US intelligence officials said they believe pro-Russian separatists most likely shot down the Malaysia Airlines plane MH17 "by mistake" last week, not realizing it was a civilian passenger flight
Speaking on condition of anonymity in Washington, they said the "most plausible explanation" for the destruction of the plane was that the separatists fired a Russian-made SA-11 missile at it after mistaking it for another kind of aircraft.
"Five days into it, (the crash) it does appear to be a mistake," one of the officials told reporters on Tuesday.
They said that their assessments were backed up by evidence from social media and by intercepted conversations of known pro-Russian separatists, whose voice prints had been verified by US agencies.
The speakers initially bragged about shooting down a transport plane, but later acknowledged that they might have made a mistake, the officials said.
President Barack Obama's administration has said it is convinced the airliner was brought down last Thursday by an SA-11 ground-to-air missile fired from territory in eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists, Al Jazeera reported.
Although the US had observed a flow of heavy weapons, including air defense systems, into Ukraine from Russia, intelligence agencies had not seen the larger SA-11 missiles being moved into the country before the airliner was downed, the officials said.
The Russian military had been training the rebels at a large base in Rostov on various weapons, including air defence systems, the officials said, but there was no explicit evidence of the Russians training the separatists on the SA-11 missile batteries.
A train bearing the dead from the downed plane finally reached Ukrainian government-held territory on Tuesday, but the pro-Russian separatists in control of the crash site showed little willingness to allow the full-scale investigation demanded by world leaders.
