Malaysia deserves support on probe into crash of flight MH17

ALMOST a year after the MH17 tragedy, Malaysia seems to have come off the sidelines to press for a United Nations-backed criminal trial for those who brought the plane down. Last week, Malaysian diplomats briefed UN Security Council members on their intention to present a resolution on this matter.

Perhaps the world will soon find out what really happened to the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft on July 17 last year while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over a rebel-held area in Ukraine. At times, it seemed that the tragic incident would be subsumed in the broader conflict between the government in Kiev and its European Union and American friends on the one side, and Russia and the rebellious Russian-speaking people in the regions along its western border, on the other.

It was initially claimed that Ukrainian rebels had shot the plane down with a Russian-supplied BUK surface-to-air missile. Remarkably, this narrative did not get unquestioning acceptance in Malaysia, where mainstream media expressed scepticism. And as investigations slowly got underway, local commentators demanded to know why Malaysia had been left out of the investigation panel initially, given that it was a Malaysian aircraft and 43 of the dead were Malaysians.