No signs of trouble were in the air on Thursday afternoon - the  day of the tragedy which killed 298 people on board the plane  heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. “My wife and I were having dinner when we heard a strange  noise sounding like clapping," says Dmitry, a local  resident.
When they went out of the house, they saw a body - more  precisely, the remains of a body - lying nearby. Dmitry believes  that it must have fallen from a high altitude.

“The only thing left on the body was a T-shirt. It was a man.  The legs were broken, I saw practically no blood,” added  Dmitry, ”Now you can smell this odor over here – there are no  words to describe it. Here is my house, and it all happened right  here.”

Aleksandr, another local who witnessed the plane falling from the  sky, was watching TV but when he heard “a roar and two  explosions.” He went out to see what was going on. “[I] saw a spinning plane without a wing with something  falling out of it. The plane was shot down,” he told RT.   “There were explosions in the sky. And apart from the loud  sounds of the plane itself, I heard the buzz which fighter jets  make.”

Falling dead bodies were also a shock for the family of Marina,  another village resident.
"I just stepped out of my house and heard thunder. My husband  came out after me and saw the body of the woman fall. He thought  it was me. He nearly turned grey," she told Ruptly.

Marina says that now she is very afraid to go outside and since  the accident she “didn't step away from her courtyard." The plane crash site is just near several coal mines. Mining is  the major industry of eastern Ukraine’s area of Donbas, which  includes Donetsk and Lugansk Regions.
When the plane fell, nearby coal miners immediately dropped their  work and rushed to the scene to help.

“There are 30 people in our shift and just two of them went  to work, others came here to help,” said Pyotr, a local  miner.
He says he has been living with his family his whole life in the  region.
“I’ve been working in this coalmine for 40 years. And now I  just want to help, that's all. Our own government is bombing  us.”

The cause of the crash is yet to be established by investigators.  The OSCE observers have arrived at the site of the crashed plane  for forensic analysis to define what exactly happened to the  Boeing 777. Both Kiev and the eastern Ukrainian self-defense forces deny  responsibility and are trading blame.
Donetsk self-defense troops declared that they simply don’t have  the military equipment to shoot down a plane from a 10,000-meter  altitude, while Kiev said it could not have fired a missile at  the passing civilian plane because it had no Buk missile  launchers deployed in the region.

Meanwhile the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Ukrainian  military has several batteries of Buk surface-to-air missile  systems with at least 27 launchers, capable of bringing down  high-flying jets, inthe Donetsk Region where the Malaysian  passenger plane crashed.

Later it added that a Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft missile battery  was operational in the region and deployed at a  site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.