MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Malaysia requires cooperation with Russia in investigating the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 plane over Ukraine, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said.

“Everyone knows that we were the victims, attacked and shot down by BUK guided missiles. We must find those responsible for bringing down the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) aircraft,” the minister said as quoted by Free Malaysia Today on Saturday, adding that “cooperation [with] Russia is a good start towards understanding what really happened to our aircraft.”

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine after being shot down while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. All 298 people on board were killed. Ukraine and pro-independence militia in the country’s southeast have blamed each other for the downing of the MH17 plane.

Dutch investigators published a report in October 2015 that said that the Malaysia Airlines aircraft appeared to have been downed using a Russia-produced Buk surface-to-air missile system. It did not identify the exact location from where the missile was fired.

The Russian arms manufacturer that builds Buk missile systems, Almaz-Antey, conducted a separate probe into the crash, finding that the missile that hit the plane could only have been launched by a Buk system located in the region of Zaroshchenske, controlled by Kiev forces at the time of the incident