News Corp’s MH17 aftermath video provides critical information to investigators
RAW footage showing the MH17 crash site minutes after the plane was shot down has been described as “invaluable” by Dutch investigators. WARNING: graphic
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AUSTRALIA’S response to the MH17 tragedy was quick and decisive and for the Australian Federal Police, it was the largest deployment of personnel since the 2004 tsunami disaster a decade earlier and the 2002 Bali bombing.
But despite the AFP’s 250-member team codenamed Operation Arew making the 22-hour dash to the Netherlands and then the 2500km trip to Ukraine’s east, for days later they never made it any further to the crash scene than the car park of their hotel.
Indeed each morning that they geared up in the car park of the rebel held capital Donetsk in readiness for a site visit, they were thwarted either by the raging separatist conflict or the bureaucracy of the rebels themselves.
When they were allowed, unarmed, to enter the crash site it was for only a limited time as the conflict raged on with sporadic bombs and gunfire in the backdrop.
The rebels had little issue with media going in but stopped short of allowing authorities and so for the Joint Investigation Team’s (JIT) investigation much had to be made of evidence gathered in the days after the disaster from sources other than their own people.
News Corp Australia can reveal its team, one of the first Western media to come across the cockpit section of the doomed plane in the immediate aftermath, had assisted in the probe not only through the photographic and reporting of the crash site — including flight charts and log books — but later securing video footage shot by the rebels themselves in the crucial minutes after the aircraft was brought down.
Staff were requested to provide more than 10 hours of evidence over two days.
The videotape, handed over to authorities a year after the tragedy and days after it was secured in July 2015, showed the moment rebels came across the still burning aircraft with commanders being seen and heard to order their men to hunt for the five pilots whom they believed had parachuted out of the aircraft.
The 17-minute tape in fact records the moment they realise it was not a military aircraft but a commercial passenger plane as they come across “Chinese” civilians, believed to have been Malaysian flight crew and bags including one where they wonder aloud why the bag tag was marked as belonging to a passenger from “Australia”.
“But where is the Sukhoi? (military plane) There it is ... it’s the passenger plane,” one said on the videotape.
Those commanders inadvertently captured on their troops’ own camcorder have since been identified by name including a former Russian policeman turned rebel leader; when they realised their mistake they ordered their men to stop filming, ensure no faces were shown and expressed fear it could end up on the internet. Also identified were the men they called on their mobiles back at their headquarters.
The tape in essence showed the Russian-backed rebels confirmed it was their own troops that had shot down what they believed had been a Ukraine military aircraft. It also showed their ransacking of luggage and cargo on-board and a blatant attempt to cover over their tracks including stripping bodies and equipment of any recording devices and USBs.
The JIT officers yesterday said the securing of the full unedited tape was invaluable and was evidence gathered from the more than 320,000 video downloads that had to be analysed. Also critical to the probe as being from those early days when officers couldn’t get in were eyewitness testimony and some 12,000 images taken by media.
“It was one of the most complicated criminal investigations we’ve ever been part off not least of all since it was conducted in the middle of a war zone,” one of those officers involved in the probe said yesterday.
“We had to get evidence from wherever we could and things like the tape and testimony from those there in the early moments has proved vital.”
Also critical was evidence of the destruction of the aircraft, News Corp Australia was at the cockpit when a team of local rescue workers began using electric metal cutting saws to cut the aircraft up into pieces rather than allowing it to be salvaged whole for later analyses.
Originally published as News Corp’s MH17 aftermath video provides critical information to investigators
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