MH17 Cockpit Sawed In Half, Pieces Missing
The MH17 crash site has been significantly altered, including having the plane’s cockpit sawed in half. As reported earlier here on the Inquisitr, international monitors sent to look at the MH17 crash site in the Ukraine are reporting that the wreckage has likely been tampered with. While western media is quick to claim that this is proof that the separatists, backed by Russia, have something to hide, a simpler explanation of why the cockpit was sawed in half may be had.
According to USA Today, about 200 of the 283 crash victims have been found and removed from the site. Their bodies are now en route to the Netherlands where they will be autopsied and given to families for burial. That article also quotes Michael Bociukiw, spokesman for the international monitors from Europe sent to investigate the site. His opinion speaks volumes for the investigating they plan to do.
“What are they [the separatists] trying to hide?” He asks.
Recently, the European Union issued sanctions against several Russian officials and others involved with the separatists as reprisals against their lack of cooperation in the investigation. While these were being announced, a separatist leader gave the MH17 flight’s data recorders to a Malaysian delegation, who said the boxes were in “good condition.”
So we have a simple question to be answered: why did the separatists have the cockpit sawed in half and otherwise hack into the downed aircraft? Going with the maxim that the simplest answer is most often correct, we can guess that in order to get to some of the bodies embedded in the crash and to the black boxes required for investigation, the cockpit had to be sawed in half and other portions of the wreckage cut up to be removed for access to the victims’ bodies. This is, in fact, the explanation given by the separatists for the cockpit being sawed in half.
It is entirely possible, of course, that the separatists do have something to hide. Given the gravity of the situation and the international pressure being put on them, however, it makes little sense for them to deliberately have the cockpit sawed in half and pieces carried away. That would, after all, be a little obvious.
Further, there is debate about who, exactly, may have shot down the plane itself. So far, neither side of that argument has put forth any plausible evidence to explain the event. On that front, NPR reports that the claims of the U.S. are from “intelligence” and satellite imagery, which have not been released, and show a Russian-made SA-11 missile being used. Meanwhile, the Russians claim that satellites show a Ukranian aircraft, likely a fighter, also in the vicinity at the time of the crash – they too release no footage to back this claim. The NPR’s man on the ground in the Ukraine is hearing eyewitness stories that back Moscow rather than Washington.
Meanwhile, families are still grieving and the politics of a cockpit sawed in half seem of little consequence when the lives of 283 people have been taken away in a war on the other side of the globe.
