Earlier, when we commented in the abnormality [3]in the flight path of flight MH-17 we said that "perhaps before coming to "certain" conclusion about the involvement of this rebel or that, the key questions one should ask before casting blame, is why did the pilot divert from his usual flight plan, why did he fly above restricted airspace, and just what, if any instructions, did Kiev air control give the pilot in the minutes before the tragic explosion?"
The simple answer would have come if Ukraine had merely released the Air Traffic Control recording from the tower and flight MH 17, something Malaysia did in the aftermath of the disappearance of flight MH 370, which at last check has still not been uncovered.
It now appears that answer will not be forthcoming because as the BBC reports [4]"Ukraine's SBU security service [5]has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency."
What happens to the recordings next is completely unknown. What is known is that any hope of getting an undoctored explanation why the plane flew as it did, or what the pilots may have seen or said in the moments before the explosion, is forever gone.
It also means that any hope of actually working with facts instead of emotional appeals, and getting to the bottom of the Malaysian airline tragedy, resides in what may be recorded by the black box, whose location right now is now exactly clear. From the Independent [6]:
"Ukraine's emergency services have found two black boxes at the crash site of the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, the governor of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region has been quoted as saying.
"Two black boxes were found by our emergency services. I have no information on where these boxes are at the moment," Kostyantyn Batovsky told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
Pro-Russian separatists in the region said on Thursday they had found one black box when the Malaysian airliner came down between Krasni Luch in Luhansk region and Shakhtarsk in the neighbouring region of Donetsk.
The Interfax-Ukraine news agency had claimed the first black box has been sent to Moscow for analysis, the BBC reported. The news agency now reports a second black box has been recovered at the crash site.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been quoted as saying Russia does not plan to take the "black box" flight recorders from downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in territory held by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine,
However, separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai told the Associated Press: "No black boxes have been found ... We hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened."
A spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry in Kiev declined to comment on the report.
In other words, even more fact-free confusion and speculation which is just what a propaganda-based reporting system needs.
And so, just like in the case of flight MH-370, what actually happened with MH-17 may never be known.