MH17: The full story of the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight
FLIGHT MH17 was a plane packed with people who had dreams just like ours. But a few hours after takeoff a missile ended those hopes and plans.
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MAREE Rizk doesn’t want to be in the first row of business class seats on Flight MH17.
She and husband Albert never wanted to be on this plane from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur at all.
They are heading home from their annual holiday. They’ve been the “happiest they’d ever been”, even if loss has been a constant companion.
In March, two of her relatives disappeared on MH370.
They have travelled through Italy, Switzerland and Holland with close friends Sue and Ross Campbell.
The Campbells have flown home earlier.
When the Rizks cannot get on that flight — and therefore avoid a long stopover in KL — they resign themselves to a day of shopping.
Perhaps, over the next three hours, the Rizks lean across and chat to the South African rescue pilot Cameron Dalziel.
He may tell them about wanting to move to Cairns; they may tell him about their son James’s footy match on Saturday.
Dalziel is pleased with his window seat. He has flown missions in Afghanistan and Iraq: this is going to be a “fantastic” flight.
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He has sent a photo of his plane ticket to a mate, boasting about being bumped up to business class.
Three rows back, Tambi Jiee, along with wife Ariza and their four children, is heading home after three years in Kazakhstan, where he worked for Shell.
They impress a Malaysia Airlines ground stewardess as a “lovely family”.
Son Muhammad Afzal, 17, has used Facebook to farewell friends: “Unfortunately it seems like I’m never going to come back here, at least not in the near future,” he writes.
Nearby sits Dr Joep Lange, the “God-like” AIDS researcher, and his partner Jacqueline van Tongeren. From her seat, she checks out the menu, and messages a friend in Barcelona — the Asian selection sounds rather good.
Almost 200 people on board are Dutch. Among the novice flyers are Dutch mother and son Petra van Langeveld and Gary Slok, 15.
It doesn’t matter that they are on the wrong side of the curtain separating the 33 special people from the 247 economy passengers. Being on the flight is enough.
She is a single mum taking him for a “dream holiday”in Malaysia. Their grins ooze from a selfie they post from the 30th row.
There is a couple on a honeymoon: the fresh promise of lifelong commitment is a recurring reason for flying on MH17.
Ithamar Avnon, 27, is a former Israeli paratrooper whose father fretted during a major 2008 Gaza assault. Avnon is returning to Melbourne after a wedding in Israel and time in Amsterdam.
The Gold Coast’s Helena Sidelik, 56, has also been to a wedding. She texts friends, reportedly, before take off: “Ready for home. Boarding shortly.”
Elaine Teoh and her Dutch partner, Emiel Mahler, met while working for a foreign exchange company.
They will return to Melbourne after a wedding stop-off in Kuala Lumpur.
The van den Hende family sits in the 17th row.
They are to be welcomed back to Eynesbury, west of Melbourne, after a month-long break in Holland.
After seven years in Australia, proud mum of three Shaliza Dewa, who is Malaysian-born, is considered more “Aussie” than most.
Nick Norris, of Perth, has three grandchildren under his arm. One of them, Mo Maslin, 12, is expecting to line up for the Scarborough Sea Eagles on Sunday morning.
Mr Norris likes to sail and have a beer.
He always has a story to tell. But destiny is kind today.
It dictates that his daughter Natalia, back in Australia, steals a few words in a phone call before he boards. Natalia tells him she loves him.
Dutchman Cor Schilder is mindful of the carrier’s recent history. Who isn’t? A muddled inquiry and a cockpit crew under suspicion? It’s the greatest civilian mystery of the millennium.
Schilder settles in to the 32nd row with girlfriend Neeltje Tol, but not before he photographs the plane and posts an online photo: “Should it disappear, this is what it looks like.”
PART TWO IN TOMORROW’S SUNDAY HERALD SUN: WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE?
Among those to be attending to passengers is Sanjid Singh Sandhu: he has changed cabin crew shifts with a colleague to get home to his parents.
His wife, also a Malaysia Airlines crew member, has also changed shifts in recent months: she was supposed to be working on MH370 until a last-minute swap.
MH17 is just another flight, another metal cylinder jammed with seats and stacked with the hopes and drudgeries that plane travel conjures up.
Captain Wan Amran Wan Hussin has spoken to his wife about MH370. He messages her to say he will be home soon. She and their two boys, aged eight and 10, will wait at KL’s airport.
A church deacon, an aerospace engineer, a nun, doctors, an abalone diver, young couples, retirees and the step-grandmother of Malaysia’s president Najib Razak are squeezed in, along with 80 children and three babies.
They have holidays to take and homes to return to and appointments to keep.
The Maslin and van den Hende kids have school and stories to share. Another 70-hour work week looms on Monday for Albert Rizk, a director at Sunbury’s Raine and Horne real estate.
First, there’s the tedium of getting to KL, the 12 hours resigned to a seat 18 inches wide (in economy) and the odd toilet break.
Upfront, Michael and Carol Clancy, from Wollongong, have treated themselves to 22-inch wide seats, in part to celebrate his retirement after 35 years as a primary school teacher.
In rows 14 and 15 sit families from the same Dutch street.
In row 16 the Paulissens are taking their children, aged five and three, to visit their Indonesian grandmother’s grave.
In row 27, Regis Crolla cannot contain himself. “I’m so excited,” he writes with an Instagram photo of his ticket.
Ground stewardess Renuka Manisha Virangna Birbal has helped in the usual check-in chaos at Schipol Airport. Grandchildren, on their first holiday, being waved off by grandparents. The “beautiful little girl” with the “beautiful big” eyes. Her father pushing the pram. The father who introduces his son, wife and daughter. “Goodbye, see you soon,” he tells them.
Birbal has escorted the last two passengers allowed on to the flight.
They are “so pleased” to make it.
It is about 10 hours before those airport farewells.
Secret military movements are going on in the blackness of night in a little war that few, if any, of the MH17 passengers know anything about.
It’s a dispute going back to the stains of Stalin and one of his blackest legacies.
Peasants, perhaps five million or more, were starved for an ideal called collectivisation. Ukrainians call it the Holodomor, or the Hunger.
They want the world to recognise it as genocide.
The hatreds have simmered for 80 years.
The deserted “bread basket” would be filled with ethnic Russians, who now consider this their land.
Early this year, Ukraine tipped out President Viktor Yanukovych, who had spurned a widespread yearning for a more European sensibility. He promptly sought sanctuary in Russia.
Tensions in east Ukraine erupted anew in March, yet the agitators are no longer Stalin’s goons condemning entire regions to slow death.
Instead, it seems, the conflict throws up self-proclaimed leaders who preen themselves like KAOS strongmen from TV’s Get Smart.
Into this, or rather over it, flies MH17 at 33,000 feet, along a route that dozens of other carriers use, and a dozen other commercial planes fly the same day.
Malaysia’s transport minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai calls it a “highway in the sky”. It also happens to be a war zone where enemy combatants describe one another, in age-old fashion, as “dogs” who don’t bury their own dead.
Europe is sleeping.
A surface-to-air missile launcher sits on a truck that rumbles across the Russian border into Ukraine, according to later Ukraine intelligence reports.
Accompanying the load are three to six Russian military operators.
SA-11s were designed by Russia in 1972.
They have four missiles that can hit, at three times the speed of sound, jet fighters that cruise at about twice the speed of sound. SA-11s, or Buks, detonate at 16 or more metres before the target, so that their 70kg of high explosive detonates for maximum fragmentation.
The meanderings of this particular launcher are hardly a secret. Nor is the timing a surprise: Ukrainian troops have won back significant gains in recent weeks.
The SA-11 receives a tank and armoured personnel carrier escort after arriving in Donetsk about 9am, according to a Sunday Times report.
It will be spotted next to a supermarket near Torez. An Associated Press reporter films its travels.
Ukraine’s intelligence service has posted online transcripts of phone intercepts purportedly between militants discussing the weapon’s delivery.
US intelligence has since confirmed the material’s authenticity.
A separatist fighter is overheard asking a superior, said to be a Russian intelligence officer: “Where should we load this cutie?”
By 4pm, the SA-11 is positioned near the town of Pervomaysk. It is commanded by a junior officer, known as “Miner”. He is assumed to be on high alert for another plane target.
In the past month, the separatists have shot down at least four aircraft, including a fighter jet and, a few days ago, a military cargo plane.
Bragging rights for such successes spread up the separatist chain of chain. One self-styled separatist leader is Igor Bezler, known as “Bes” (or devil).
His shows of triumph serve as an introduction to the separatist leadership.
Bezler is “Miner’s” commander. He has been running a town called Gorlovka from a police compound fortified by jumbles of tyres and barbed wire.
A Russian born in Crimea, an ex-Russian lieutenant-colonel and possibly a former Russian intelligence officer, he was sacked as a funeral director for embezzlement.
No matter. Bezler raced to join the Russian build-up in Crimea before the region was annexed in March.
On returning to Gorlovka, Bezler made a video of himself ordering the execution of two blindfolded Ukrainians. Later, he claimed the firing squad used rubber bullets.
In July, Bezler explained that his men could not always find downed planes because they fall into enemy territory, but that his men had posted photographs of the six parachutes they’d found.
Enthusiasm, then, sounds high.
About 4.10pm, a radar operator reports a sighting: according to reports, a large aircraft at high altitude.
SA-11s cannot distinguish between military and civilian aircraft.
It seems possible, if not likely, that the aircraft is mistaken for an AN-26 transporter like that shot down a few days earlier.
It is thought the mysterious “Miner” gives the order to fire on MH17.
THE unkind Scarborough Sea Eagles scoreline may have been different if Mo Maslin had made his Sunday footy match.
Joep Lange cannot make his planned catch-up dinner on Tuesday with Thai AIDS expert Praphan Phanuphak.
Piers van den Hende, 15, never again admires the pine cabinet he filed and sanded after school to finish before his holiday; brother Marnix, 12, never betters the 50 metre butterfly personal best he set in March.
They do not suffer. They do not know.
It may be the most important fact that grieving relatives, amid the confusion and lies, can cling to with absolute confidence.
Medical examiners and crash site investigators line up from around the world to speak of decompression and deceleration and freezing temperatures.
Unconsciousness, if not death, is instant.
They cite ghoulish medical evidence from previous air disasters, such as a lack of water in the lungs of victims in high-altitude explosions over sea.
There’s the missile blast itself. Shrapnel punches holes, according to photo analysis of the wreckage, about as big as a child’s fist.
As a relative of the Malaysian family of six puts it, the MH17 passengers are gone in a “blink of an eye”. “No one was conscious or experienced that fall,” James Vosswinkel, a trauma surgeon who studied the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe of 1996, later tells Bloomberg.
They are three hours into their flight, about 30km from the Russian border, high above the swathes of yellow sunflowers. Nearby, according to later reports, fly an Air India Boeing 787 and a Singapore Airlines 777.
The boom echoes about 4.20pm. Smoke trails across the Ukraine sky. Tatiana, a local from the farming village of Rasypnoye, is working in the fields.
As she later tells the News Corp’s Charles Miranda, she will never forget the “raining humans”.
Bodies thud into fields and crash through roofs. At first, war-weary locals mistake them for bombs.
Homeowner Inna Tipunova will later show Miranda where a woman, perhaps in her 50s, has crashed through her son’s granny flat.
Blood splatters pots and pans: the mess reaches corners that cannot be reached.
In the delay until the body’s removal, Tipunova will grow eager to learn more about the woman she knows only as “Number 26”.
More than 39 victims fall here, in the newly titled “village of the dead”. “When the sunflowers fall, we will find more,” one woman later predicts.
At an orphanage, a child will tell Miranda of “big birds falling to us from the sky”. Two bodies land in the orphanage garden, where the children eat a late lunch. The victims are dismembered and naked.
Across the road, a section of the cockpit will turn up. Books and bags fall, as does a male torso strapped to a seat.
It is “almost Biblical”, one woman will say. Soft toys fall from heaven, too.
They will be gathered for a makeshift memorial.
Bezler is on the phone about half an hour later.
“We have just shot down a plane,” he tells Vasili Geranin, whom the Ukrainians claim to be Russian military intelligence.
The news spreads fast, but not fast enough for Igor Girkin, the defence chief of the so-called Donetsk People’s Army.
He has fought in many conflicts: there is a question mark concerning a kidnapping and murder in Ukraine’s Slaviansk.
He can’t wait to post the plane crash on his Russian social media page. There’s no time to check facts.
“We did warn you — do not fly in our sky,” appears a message under his name, in a post that also offers a video of rising black smoke.
Another intercepted conversation between separatists speaks of finding the first casualty — “a civilian”. The “Major” goes on: “In short, it was 100 per cent a passenger aircraft.”
In a third conversation, a commander, Nikolay Kozitsin is told of Malaysia Airlines insignias on the wreckage: “That means they were carrying spies. They shouldn’t be f------ flying. There is a war going on.”
Girkin’s boastful posting disappears from the internet, as does another boast about acquiring SA-11s from a Ukrainian regiment.
It’s too late: the message is distributed. It’s just one thread in a circumstantial case that is already compelling.
The US has shown a keen interest in the region since the conflict blew up.
Satellite imagery shows the smoke trail from the missile rising from separatist territory near the town of Torez.
Its trajectory helps eliminate any question it was fired by Ukraine.
About 11pm, the launcher starts crawling back to the Russian border.
As verified video footage depicts, it is sighted in the Krasnodon area and appears to be short one missile.
The world has now glimpsed Girkin, and the seeming conflict of his trim moustache and bombastic stylings. However, in coming days he will stay cloaked, as will Bezler: soon enough, Kiev will finger them as being assassination targets for the Russian special services, because they are “unwanted witnesses” who could implicate Russia.
Instead, their boss will wander out, in jeans mostly, to roll his eyes in mock horror and tell the world it’s looking in the wrong places.
Alexander Borodai has been the so-called Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic since May.
Soon after, his men got in a firefight with Bezler’s, and Borodai called Bezler a “terrorist”. Internal disputes are common, apparently: it will explain the later release to the BBC of a damning video of separatists at the MH17 crash site.
An ultranationalist in the 1990s, before such ideologies were re-embraced by Russia’s mainstream, Borodai has said the boundaries of Russia’s world are much bigger than the boundaries of the Russian Federation.
He’s as unpolished for the cameras as his ungroomed appearance suggests.
In the face of overwhelming evidence pointing to his troops’ buffoonery, Borodai will offer coverall explanations.
“I am telling you again, we have never been in possession of a single Buk system,” he will say. As for the internet, well, it’s “practically all lies”.
“It strains credibility to think (the missile) could be used by separatists without at least some measure of Russian support and technical assistance,” a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, will say.
Yet Kirby, like the rest of us, may be blinkered at first by geopolitics, seduced as we are by commonsense probabilities coupled with technologies that appear to offer little room for ambiguity.
The usual rules do not apply, not in a pseudo-fiefdom run by a self-professed “ordinary citizen” of Russia.
Borodai, for the record, claims no official ties with the homeland he seeks to expand.
As Prime Minister Tony Abbott says simply in the hours after the crash, the destruction of MH17 stands as a “crime”.
He is informed of the crash at 6 on Friday morning.
By 10 he is canvassing world leaders.
By 11, he is telling Australians about the need for truth and the pursuit of justice.
Abbott, along with Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, will rise beyond the obligations of his station, as if channelling the ghost of Abbott’s long-gone predecessor Billy Hughes.
When US president Woodrow Wilson queried Hughes’s rumblings at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles conference, given Australia’s relative place in world affairs, Hughes replied: “I speak for 60,000 dead. For how many do you speak?”
The question for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is not for how many, but to whom.
He commands two audiences, yet only one appears to matter — the people at home who pushed his popularity past 83 per cent after he invaded Crimea. If he cared for what Europe and Ukraine think, he would not threaten their gas supplies as he regularly does.
When Putin chooses, he doesn’t say much at all.
In the first hours, he says Ukraine is at fault: if there was no war, there would be no missile strike.
It makes little sense, this statement, yet Putin is moved to say little more for another four days, when his military — in defiance of all evidence — announces that a Ukrainian fighter jet may be to blame.
By then, thanks to a United Nations resolution and two phone calls with Moscow, Abbott — the victims’ advocate — will have some of what he wants.
Despite this, Putin — the political snake — may have all that he needs.
PART TWO IN TOMORROW’S SUNDAY HERALD SUN: WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE?
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