Dutch Prosecutor Reveals New Details Of MH17 Forensic Probe

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 08th June, 2020) A Dutch prosecutor told the trial, which resumed Monday in a bid to shed light on the 2014 downing of flight MH17, that a metal shard found in a pilot's body appeared to be from a newer type of the Buk missile.

"There were 29 steel shards found in the crew's bodies. One of them was shaped like a butterfly. A forensic pathologist found it in the body of the crew's captain," Thijs Berger said.

Another butterfly-shaped shrapnel fragment was found in the plane's cockpit. These were the only two shrapnel pieces among 370 shards recovered from the scene that still had this distinctive shape.�

Berger said that the Netherlands Forensic Institute compared the missile fragments to those collected after exploding Buk missiles in Ukraine and the Netherlands and found that "there were more similarities to a Buk of the 9М38М1 type than of the 9М38 type.

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Russian state arms company Almaz Antey conducted its own tests in 2015 that showed that the Boeing jet had been downed by a Buk 9М38 that was last produced in 1986 and decommissioned in 2011. It said the newer type of the missile would have left more butterfly-shaped holes in the fuselage.

The Dutch-led investigative team, which is probing the crash of the Malaysian plane in Ukraine with 298 people on board, has been trying to link it to a Russian military unit. Russia has argued that Ukrainian forces fired the Buk that struck the jetliner.