Re: That's not nice, but...
Gosh, who'd have thought a member of Putin's paid trol
Read the damn report. The missile attacked the target directly and exploded ahead of the cockpit.
The newer Buks in the Russian arsenal do not attack the target directly because they are specifically designed to attack targets with reduced radar and IR profile from below and looking at the aircraft "head-on"/"from the sides". They do this by going up to a predetermined coordinates calculated by the launch complex and looking at the predicted target area from _ABOVE_. I actually have seen the math for this when it first came out circa 1979 before it became classified and I personally know who derived the formulate to compute the coordinates to which the missile goes before enabling the seeker head.
There is a simple rationale behind this design - most radar sig reduction tech sucks from that point of view. So if it was a newer one it would have hit most likely in the middle of the plane from above, not ahead of the cockpit.
Based on this report and based on data published so far the "Russian supplied buk" as repeatedly claimed by Eu and USA officials does not match. That is not surprising either - the rebels pinched an unknown number of Bucks from Ukrainian military bases in the beginning of the war. That is a well known fact.
The question of why the plane was flying 20km off-corridor exactly where the rebels took down a couple of Su-25s a few days earlier is also unanswered in the report.
As far as who shot it down, it is most likely the rebels. With a Ukrainian Buk they pinched. Now why did they shoot it down - it is a different story. One we may never know. It would have taken something else besides the aircraft being 20km off-corridor in the middle of the conflict zone for them to pull the trigger. What - it will take finding who and bringing him to justice to know (if he has not been terminated long ago).