Malaysian plane crashes on Ukraine-Russia border - live

[jakeXT]

172. Ukraine also shot one down 14 years ago

MOSCOW, Oct. 13— In strained language that acknowledged only a ''tragic coincidence,'' Ukraine's president, Leonid Kuchma, stated today that he accepted investigators' preliminary finding that his military accidentally destroyed a Russian airliner over the Black Sea last week with an errant missile.

Mr. Kuchma's written statement, released tonight, did not explicitly state that the military was at fault. ''Obviously, final results of the commission's inquiry will be known after experts complete their in-depth investigation and make appropriate assessments public,'' he said. ''But even today it can be said that a big tragedy took place.''

Earlier today, Ukraine's military had taken responsibility after nine days of increasingly vaporous denials.

Seventy-eight people, most of them Russian émigrés to Israel, died when the Siberian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded and plunged 35,000 feet into the sea off the Russian coast. Four minutes earlier, a Ukrainian air defense exercise fired two long-range antiaircraft missiles at a drone off the Black Sea's Crimean coast.


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/world/after-9-days-ukraine-says-its-missile-hit-a-russian-jet.html