In a short statement issued at the Dutch Safety Board located at the Hague, investigators said today that their investigation into the crash of MH-17 over Eastern Ukraine that took the lives of 298 people, two-thirds of which were Dutch, was caused by “high-energy objects.”

Ruled out as a cause of the crash was pilot error or technical problems.

For the first time, official findings have finally been released after two months of speculation. The chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, Tjibbe Joustra, said “The available images show that pieces of wreckage were punctured in numerous places.”

Joustra continued, saying,  “The pattern of damage to the body of the aircraft and the cockpit is consistent with the damage that would be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft.”

Because continued fighting in the area where the aircraft was downed, many of the official investigators were unable to access the site and so the report was largely based on photos taken at the crash site and the aircraft’s black boxes.

Although the report nevcer specifically mentioned a misseile, the west continues to blame the separatists of Eastern Ukraine of using a surface to air missile to shoot down the plane. Sepaeratists however continue to say that they don’t have the hardware capable of shooting down an aircraft of  that type.

The commercial aircraft was on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it went down.

  investigation, mh-17, report, Ukraine, world