Residents of the Ukrainian village where a Malaysian airliner was shot down with 298 people aboard a year ago joined a procession to the crash site on Friday, while Australia's prime minister remembered the "savagery" of the disaster as he unveiled a plaque in Canberra set in soil taken from where the wreckage fell.
The two ceremonies come amid a sharp dispute over who was responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17 last year.
Ukrainian and Western authorities say the plane was downed by a missile fired either by rebels or Russian troops.
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A relative of an Australian victim of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 reacts before placing flowers at a memorial unveiled outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Friday. David Gray / Reuters |
The rebels and Moscow say it was hit by a Ukrainian warplane or a Ukrainian-fired missile.
In Hrabove, about 200 residents carrying flowers gathered in a church for a memorial service and procession to nearby fields organized by local leaders and the Russia-backed separatist rebels who control the area.
Some of the mourners held banners, accusing the Kiev government of waging a war on them and likening the MH17 victims to those killed in indiscriminate shelling in the past year and a half.
"They killed you, but our people still get killed," one banner said.
Speaking in Kiev late on Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the flight was the victim of a "terrorist attack launched from the territory occupied by Russian-backed militants in the east of Ukraine".
"The advanced weapon with which the aircraft was shot down could have come to the hands of terrorists only from Russia," he said in a late-night address on local television. "It would not have happened without the participation and an order from top political and military leaders of the neighboring state."
"Our moral duty to honor the memory of the fallen ones is to ensure a fair punishment for those guilty in downing the aircraft. This crime represents a threat to the whole international community," Poroshenko said.
The Russian Federal Air Transport Agency said MH17 couldn't have been shot by a ground-to-air missile from the areas controlled by eastern Ukrainian rebels, adding that the West is putting pressure on investigators to get the conclusions it wants, Russia Today reported.
"If the missile, as Western authorities claim, were sent from Snezhnoe area (controlled by the rebels), then according to all experts and specialists, it would have been detected by the radar station in Rostov-on-Don (region in Russia which borders on Donetsk Region)," Deputy Chief of the agency, Oleg Storchevoy, said during a briefing on the MH17 investigation on Thursday.
He also added that if the missile that targeted the Malaysian plane was launched from the town of Zaroshchensk, which was at that time controlled by Kiev troops, specialists say that "the radars would have recorded neither the launch nor the movement of the missile toward the plane".
In the Netherlands, hundreds of relatives of those killed on MH17 gathered on Friday afternoon at a conference center near the central city of Utrecht.
AP - AFP
(China Daily 07/18/2015 page9)
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