The Washington Post
MOSCOW — Evidence that the Ukrainian military mistakenly shot down a Russian passenger jet on Thursday mounted Saturday as Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the Ukrainians for withholding information about a long-range surface-to-air missile fired three minutes before the plane exploded in midair over the Black Sea.
Russian rescue workers disclosed that a cylinder-shaped object, 30 to 60 feet in length, was found bobbing vertically in the water amid the plane’s debris. Although they did not identify it as a missile part, they said it did not appear to be part of the plane.
Investigators also displayed twisted pieces of fuselage from the plane, peppered with numerous small, jagged holes. Missile experts said steel shrapnel from an exploding missile could create such punctures.
Russian officials were reluctant today to draw conclusions from their discoveries, saying they were looking into all possible causes for the plane crash that killed 78 people, many of them recent Russian emigres to Israel.
But Putin criticized the Ukrainian military for providing incomplete information about missile-firing exercises that were taking place on the shore of Black Sea as the plane headed over the water from Tel Aviv on its way to Siberia.
Branding their analysis incomplete and unsatisfactory, Putin asked the Ukrainians for more information on a 35-foot long, radar-guided SA-5 missile that was fired at 1:41 p.m. from the Crimean peninsula. The Siberian Sibir Airlines plane, flying 150 miles away at an altitude of 36,300 feet, vanished from air traffic controllers’ radar screens at 1:44 p.m.
Hours after the plane crashed, senior U.S. officials said data from an early warning missile tracking center indicated it had been hit by a surface-to-air missile.
The tracking center is operated jointly by the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. A senior U.S. official said Saturday the stray missile was almost certainly an SA-5, which has a range of 155 miles, flies three times faster than the speed of sound and can hit targets above 100,000 feet.
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