will tell us what happened anyway. we know what happened. we don t know who pushed the trigger on this missile. i don t think we ll get that from the crash scene. it won t come from the wreckage out there. finally, the shooting down of flight 17, is this a new precedent that we re looking at here, that militant groups across the world now with this incredibly advanced weaponry? yes, this is something to be very concerned about. it s already happened in syria. the free syrian army were able to go into a syrian air defense depo and take several transporter erector launchers and weeks later were able to field that system and knock down a syrian air force plane. so there is precedence for this to happen. you can see what s happening. we see rebel groups, even maybe terrorist groups, acquiring this
of the country. out of sight as fast as they could. okay. everything right now indicates that this was a mistake. they didn t know what they were shooting at. the rebels may have thought it was a ukrainian military plane, a cargo plane. if they were using this equipment correctly, is that mistake possible? not really. the fact that they shot at a civilian airliner is very troubling. what it tells me is they are probably not using the entire system. the buk missile system has four components. one is an air surveillance radar. it is capable of determining what the target is. it also has a height finder and a trans ponder interrogator that would receive the code that said i m a civilian aircraft. it doesn t look like they did that step. it looks like they turned on the tracking radar. found a piece of metal in the sky where they thought it might be and fired.
aviation experts. it was quite an accomplishment. they need a lot more time and freedom of access to go about and look carefully at the wreckage for two reasons. the black boxes may still with there and secondly to determine how this plane was brought down. we want to take a closer look at the fighting in eastern ukraine. this map highlights the area of reb rebel forces. in the weeks leading up to thursday s downing of flight 17, several ukrainian military aircraft were shot down. we have more. reporter: the signs of danger were all around. this also follows a pattern of actions by russian backed separatists. june 13th pro-russian rebels
welcome back. we have more on the crash of malaysian airlines flight 17. of the 298 who died on that plane, this was a memorial service saturday. home to more than 40 of the victims. this tragedy has hit this region especially hard. all of the netherlands is mourning. my first and foremost priority is my humanitarian duty to bring back the bodies of the dutch people who were killed to the netherlands. but immediately after that, we also have another responsibility towards the victims and their relatives. and that is to find out who is responsible for this and to do this, we need a thorough,
the plane was shot down by pro russian separatists who were using weaponry provided by russia. for a little bit of context, you will recall a day before that plane was shot down, president obama announced the stiffest round of sanctions yet against russia. but the eu did the not go as far. what we are starting to see now is convergence pressure on the eu to get to the same page with the u.s. if they feel as though additional sanctions are necessary. and what we could see, alex, if there is a russian link to all of this confirmed are some of the stiffest sanctions yet imposed both by the u.s. and by the eu. possibly those sanctions, the broadest sanctions that the u.s. would have at its disposal. white house officials say that is why there is so much focus right now on the investigation, on making sure that international investigators can access the crash site because they want to build a razor tight