Following up on our earlier item, there are still many unanswered questions about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but NBC News is reporting some additional details about this breaking news story.
Malaysia Airlines jet with 295 people on board crashed Thursday in the hostile eastern region of Ukraine, near the Russian border, and a Ukrainian government adviser said that it had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.Malaysia Airlines said that it lost contact with the plane, Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, about 30 miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border. Photos from the scene showed the blackened wreckage of the plane and bodies scattered in a field.
It is not yet clear whether there were any Americans on board the flight, though President Obama told a Delaware audience today that the information remains a top priority.
Regardless, there were reportedly 280 passengers and 15 crew on board this Boeing 777 and there are no accounts of survivors.
More from the NBC report:
A report by the Russian news agency Interfax said that the crash Thursday was in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, among the most volatile regions in the world. Pro-Russian separatists have been fighting Ukrainian security forces there for months. […]Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said on his Facebook page that the plane was hit by a Russian surface-to-air missile known as a Buk. The type of missile can hit a target far higher than Flight 17 was flying.The Associated Press reported earlier this week that it had seen a Buk system on the ground in a separatist-controlled area of eastern Ukraine.
Initially, both separatists and the Ukrainian government blamed each other for the incident.
President Obama spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier, and Flight 17 was part of their conversation.
We’ll have much more on the story on tonight’s show.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."