Today in History: Malaysian Airlines passenger plane shot down

The year was 2014 (that's right! not long ago!) and it was during a conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russia separatist forces that were fighting in a war of sorts known as the War in Donbass. We have all kind of swept this under the rug so to speak, despite the fact that the conflict wasn't very long ago.

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It was concluded that the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile system of Russian origin and intelligence sources suggested that because of this, that Russia was to blame (I don't have an opinion about this but I always take "military intelligence" information with a grain of salt.)

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Predictably, Moscow denied all involvement in the incident and instead pointed the finger at Ukraine National Forces. Regardless of who was responsible, I think it is safe to say that the shooting down of a civilian airliner was almost certainly an accidental case of mistaking the plane for military aircraft because neither side stood to gain anything by using a rather expensive weapon to destroy a civilian aircraft that wasn't in any way involved in the conflict.

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I think it is quite evident from the pictures but there were no survivors. All of the passengers, most of which were Dutch, perished in the crash as did all of the crew. It has been suggested that the plane broke into pieces while airborne. The total body count was 298.

There are a number of conspiracy theories floating around that this was an intentional false-flag operation on the part of the Ukraine to draw global attention to the conflict that was being largely ignored by the world's super-powers.