Britain has agreed to a Dutch request for air accident investigators to retrieve data from the black boxes of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was downed over Ukraine, Prime Minister David Cameron said on his Twitter feed Tuesday. The two boxes may shed light on Western claims that flight MH17 was shot down with a Russian surface-to-air missile fired from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The boxes were given to Malaysian officials in a late-night handover Monday in the rebel-held east Ukraine city of Donetsk. The UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), based in Farnborough, southern England, is part of the Department for Transport and is responsible for the investigation of civil aircraft accidents and serious incidents.
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