What’s next — UFOs?
Russian state TV is spouting one wacky conspiracy theory after another in the attack on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 — all of them clearing Moscow of any blame.
Within hours of the crash, Rossiya 1 claimed Ukrainian fighter pilots had seen the airline’s red, white and blue logo on the plane and fired on it, believing it was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official jet.
The station failed to note that Putin had stopped flying in Ukrainian airspace in March, when he set off the country’s ongoing civil war by annexing Crimea.
Another kooky theory came from Russia’s most-watched TV station, Channel One, which claimed pro-Russian rebels actually did shoot down a jet on Thursday — just not Flight 17.
The rebels, it claimed, blasted the Ukrainian fighter jet that shot down Flight 17. The account is credited to a supposed eyewitness identified only as “Tatiana.”
The weirdest conspiracy theory came Friday, with a rebel leader insisting the bodies found at the crash site were already decomposed and “drained of blood” and likely died days before the plane took off.
The commander, Igor Girkin, suggested to the pro-rebel, pro-Moscow Web site Russkaya Vesna that the downing of Flight 17 was staged to implicate the separatists, according to the Washington Times.
“Ukrainian authorities are capable of any baseness,” he reportedly said.
Meanwhile, Sara Firth, a London-based reporter for the Kremlin-backed Russia Today network, quit over the state-ordered lies, telling the UK’s Press Gazette newspaper Friday that she was fed up with the “disrespect for the facts.”