At 4.20pm on July 17 last year, a Buk 9M38 anti-aircraft missile exploded metres from the port side of the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing the three crew members on the flight deck instantly. For the other 290 or so other people on the plane, death was probably not so swift.The results of a 15-month investigation led by the Dutch Safety Board into the shooting down of the passenger plane, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, were released yesterday, telling the story of the tragedy of MH17 in unprecedented detail, including the missile used, from where it was fired, and how the aircraft broke up.While the missile's impact killed some of the crew, passengers further back were likely to have been conscious for up to 90 seconds as the plane fell to earth.The investigators unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of the plane to the journalists and family members of victims at a conference in Gilze-Rijen in the Netherlands. Some of the nose, cockpit and business class of the Boeing 777 were rebuilt from fragments of the aircraft recovered from the crash scene.Ukraine and Western nations have contended that the missile was fired by Russian-backed rebels, and while the report did not apportion blame, the findings indicated the plane was shot down by a Russian-built anti-aircraft missile fired from a 200 sq km-area south of the town of Snizhne, most of which was controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. The findings also ruled out the claim the aircraft was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet - a theory proposed by Russian defence officials and representatives of the Donetsk People's Republic, the breakaway state that controls the crash site.Tjibbe Joustra, the safety board chairman, had stern words for the Ukrainian authorities, saying they should have closed the airspace over the war zone to civilian aircraft."There was sufficient reason for the Ukrainian authorities to close the airspace above the eastern part of their country," Joustra said, adding that at least 16 Ukrainian military aircraft had been shot down in the area in the months before the MH17 disaster.Russian officials cast doubt on the findings, releasing their own report hours before the Dutch that claimed an older kind of warhead had been used and that it had been fired from another position to the southwest.The safety board's report is a strictly technical air accident investigation and does not apportion blame or criminal responsibility. A separate criminal investigation, led by the Dutch police and including detectives from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine, is due to report next year. Dutch prosecutors have said they expect to produce a dossier of evidence for charges of murder and possibly war crimes. ..