Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk missile, the Dutch Safety Board said today in its final report on the July 2014 crash that killed all 298 people aboard.
The long awaited findings of the board, which was not empowered to address questions of responsibility, did not specify who launched the missile.
However, the Russian maker of BUK missiles sought to discredit the findings of the Dutch inquiry.
State-controlled Russian firm Almaz-Antey showed videos of a BUK missile being exploded close to the nose of a decommissioned Ilyushin plane.
The experiment, it said, disproved claims the missile was shot down from Snizhne, a village controlled by pro-Russian rebels.
Instead they said the passenger jet seems to have been shot down from territory disputed by insurgents and Ukrainian troops, and by an outdated version of the BUK missile that is no longer in use by the Russian military.
"The results of the experiment completely dispute the conclusions of the Dutch commission about the type of the rocket and the launch site," said Yan Novikov, director of Almaz-Antey.
Barry Sweeney, whose 28-year-old son Liam was on board the plane, told the BBC they were told a Russian-made Buk missile exploded, hitting the cockpit first, killing the pilots.
That would have caused disorientation and confusion in the rest of the plane, he said.
"Hopefully most people were unconscious by the time this happened and death would have occurred pretty quick," he said.
"That is a comfort for 298 sets of relatives."
