UN Security Council Holds Meeting to Discuss Malaysian Flight Crash
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss who and what brought down Malaysian Airlines' Flight MH17 Thursday. The Council said a "full, thorough and independent international investigation" will be conducted to examine exactly what happened.
Pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine where the plane went down are to allow access to the crash site for investigators. Both Ukranian and pro-russian forces accused each other of attacking the plane Thursday.
At the open of the Security Council meeting, representatives held a moment of silence and expressed condolences to families of Flight MH17's passengers. Aboard the Boeing 777 were 298 passengers and crew, all of whom are presumed dead.
While the parties responsible for the place crash have not been determined, it has been reported that the plane was struck by a Buk missile system, a Russian-made, medium-range surface-to-air launcher.
"We don't know exactly what happened yet, and I don't want to get ahead of the facts," President Obama said in a news briefing. "What I do know is that we have seen a ticking up of violence in eastern Ukraine."
Obama said that President Putin still had the most control in stopping the conflict between the Ukrainian government and Russian separatists.
The Malaysian Airlines flight, headed from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed about 50 km from the Ukraine-Russia border, near Grabovo in the Ukraine. MH17's passengers included HIV/AIDS researchers planning on attending a conference in Australia, as well as 80 children.
"This certainly will be a wake-up call for Europe and the world that there are consequences to an escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine. It is not going to be localized, it is not going to be contained," Obama said.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe investigators reached the crash site Friday, and the 30 monitors will be examining the wreckage over the next several days.
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