The United States hasn’t found proof of direct Russian government involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — but senior intelligence officials on Tuesday blamed Moscow for supplying the missile.
Officials said Russia “created the conditions” that led to the deadly attack by arming the Ukrainian rebels suspected of firing the SA-11 surface-to-air missile that blew the Boeing 777 out of the sky on Thursday.
One official also said the passenger plane was most likely shot down “by mistake” — killing all 298 people aboard and sparking an ongoing crisis.
The officials said they didn’t know if any Russians were present when the weapon was fired, or who pushed the button.
“We don’t know a name, we don’t know a rank and we’re not even 100 percent sure of a nationality,” one official said.
“There is not going to be a Perry Mason moment here.”
Earlier in the day, a Ukrainian official said the missile was “absolutely” fired by a Russian.
Vitaly Nayda, Ukraine’s director of informational security, told CNN that his government “taped conversations” of a Russian officer with his office in Moscow “several minutes before the missile was launched.”
“They knew the plane was coming with constant speed, in constant direction,” Nayda said.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the aircraft’s wreckage had been tampered with “on an industrial scale,” noting darkly, “After the crime, comes the coverup.”
Col. Andriy Lysenko of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council also alleged that Russian military operatives had “worked at the crash site under the guise of civilians.”
European monitors saw men in uniforms use power tools to chop up remnants of the passenger plane, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said.
“The rear part of the aircraft, one of the biggest intact pieces, has definitely been hacked into,” OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw said.
He added that “a diesel-powered saw” was used to cut apart the cockpit, possibly in a legitimate effort to recover bodies.
Also Tuesday, a Dutch official questioned if all 282 bodies purportedly turned over by rebels arrived by train in the government-controlled Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Jan Tuinder, head of a forensic body-recovery team, said investigators would return to the crash scene to search for more remains, the BBC reported.