Happened. It seems dubious that the Russian Military, in other words, would want to take down a major passenger plane. Certainly with not the intent of taking it down. Again, we simply dont know who brought this down. Im also here with lieu dtenant colonel rick francona. Just in terms of kants, we have not seen separatists heretofor, they have brought down at least one transport plane, but they were not flying at 33,000 feet. Yeah, this would require, as we were talking about, a more sophisticated system. Talking about, you know, hitting it inadvertently, it would be very difficult for that to happen. Generally once youre locked onto the target, it goes to that target. And if it veers off that target and is no longer being guided, they selfdestruct. But when youre targeting a plane at that altitude, are you
clear on exactly what kind of a plane it is . No, its a return on your radar. Right. It will be a certain size, you can estimate the size of the aircraft. You may have other sensors
good afternoon, i m anderson cooper. we are following breaking news right now. the malaysian airlines flight, a boeing 777, has crashed near the border between ukraine and russia. this is graphic video, we want to warn you, showing the aftermath of this crash. these are images we are just starting to get in. we are now getting new pictures of the moment the plane itself crashed in a fiery explosion off on the horizon in this video. malaysian airlines confirming that they lost contact with flight mh17. there you see the impact, the fireball, flames, the presence of fuel obviously still there in the fuselage as richard quest noted a short time ago. this is a plane which would have been loaded up with fuel because of the long flight between amsterdam where the plane took off, was heading toward kuala lumpur in malaysia. a plane carrying 295 people, 280
amount of territory, my guess is it came undone at altitude, and thankfully in this kind of tragedy, death was very quickly. was quick. 295 people on board. and just in that image, we saw a guide book, a lonely planet guide book for bali, the idea you brought up, richard, these are people headed on vacation. these are people probably with their families going on vacation to bali, to other places. absolutely no question in my mind. at this time of the year, that plane is full of holiday makers on their way to do lifelong holidays. now i m sorry, i m told we re getting some more information from jim sciutto. jim, what are you hearing? anderson, i ve just been told by the ukrainian foreign ministry that it is their belief that this plane was taken down by a russian-made buk missile system that you have mentioned
plane. precisely, which is why, as i say, all the signs suggest that what happened here was that the russian government has had this strategy off training these rogue elements within ukraine to make this kind of trouble for the ukrainian government. this thing went badly awry as a result of that. but frankly, in a perfectly predictable way, when you start using these kinds of forces to do your dirty work for you, something like this is bound to happen because these are not disciplined forces that are under tight command and control from the kremlin. and back to the first point you were making, this produces a major international incident because it points out that what russia has been doing has not only been destabilizing ukraine but destabilizing it on the cheap in a dangerous way largely to preserve a kind of plausible deniability, but now we see the consequences. and we talked to senator john mccain a short time ago in our last hour. he said and he was very
is, that is a casualty, a terrible casualty of the ukrainian/russian conflict, this is huge because it s even bigger than kal because in this case what appears what might have happened and again, a lot of caveats, but what might have happened is that the russian government has been supporting, training, arming rebels, separatists in ukraine, essentially teaching them how to do this kind of thing. those forces have in the past shot down helicopters of the ukrainian army, cargo planes, as you noted. it would not be difficult to imagine that they thought this was a ukrainian cargo plane because these are poorly trained, ill-equipped. they probably don t have the right kind of radar to figure it out, and they probably don t care. these are not, you know, people following safety precautions. in fact, the separatist group just shortly before this plane went down had bragged about, on this day, bringing down what they said was ukrainian military