Stardate 20011010.0412 (On Screen): It looks like Ukraine is pulling back from its claims that it was not responsible for shooting down a Russian jetliner. They still haven't admitted culpability, but they will "accept Russian investigators' findings", which amounts to an admission of guilt. The findings are pretty damning: the Russians found in both corpses and in wreckage
many small steel balls, 7-8 mm in diameter. That's what the
warhead of an SA-5 fires at whatever it's trying to destroy. It's really rather difficult to come up with any other plausible explanation for their presence. A terrorist bomb, for example, wouldn't have included such things because it would have massively increased the size and weight of the bomb (and therefore the difficulty of smuggling it onto the jet) without increasing its effectiveness in bringing the jet down. That, combined with the fact that US intelligence monitored an SA-5 launch minutes before the jet exploded, looks an awful lot like a smoking gun.
(discuss)
