A Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine by militants on Thursday, killing all 295 people aboard, a Ukrainian interior ministry official was quoted as saying by Interfax-Ukraine news agency.<\/p>\n
The aircraft, which other sources said was a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, came down near the city of Donetsk, stronghold of pro-Russian rebels, Anton Gerashchenko said, adding that it was hit by a ground-to-air missile.<\/p>\n
There was no further confirmation of the report, although Ukrainian officials said local residents had found wreckage.<\/p>\n
Malaysia Airlines said on its Twitter feed it had lost contact with its flight MH-17 from Amsterdam. “The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace,” it said.<\/p>\n
Gerashchenko was quoted as saying: “A civilian airliner travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur has just been shot down by a Buk anti-aircraft system … 280 passengers and 15 crew have been killed.”<\/p>\n
Interfax-Ukraine quoted another Ukrainian official as saying the plane disappeared from radar when it was flying at 10,000 metres<\/span> (33,000 feet), a typical cruising altitude for<\/span> airliners.<\/p>\n It came down at Torez, near Shakhtersk, some 40 km (25 miles) from the Russia<\/span> border. The area has been the scene of fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels.<\/p>\n Ukraine has accused Russia of taking an active role in the four-month-old conflict in recent days and accused it earlier on Thursday of shooting down a Ukrainian fighter jet – an accusation that Moscow denied.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine by militants on Thursday, killing all 295 people aboard, a Ukrainian interior ministry official was quoted as saying by Interfax-Ukraine news agency. The aircraft, which other sources said was a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, came down near the city of Donetsk, stronghold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":32687,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-32592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}