Vigil for Victims of MH 17
A family waits to place flowers at a vigil for victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in Kuala Lumpur July 22, 2014. A train carrying the remains of some of the nearly 300 victims of the Malaysia Airlines plane downed over Ukraine was heading for Ukrainian government territory on Tuesday as a separatist leader handed over the plane's black boxes to Malaysian experts. Reuters

Adding a new twist to the existing theories on who shot down the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine on July 17, Germany's intelligence agency BND has squarely blamed the eastern Ukrainian rebels for the brutal act.

The air crash killed all the 298 passengers on board where a majority of them were Dutch nationals, flying to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. In a testimony to the German parliament, BND claimed that a 9k37 Buk missile was used in the shoot-down and reinforced its conclusions with analysis of the satellite images, reports Daily Mail. UK. The German agency's report has not been made public.

Not Russian Supplied Missile

The new findings by BND contradict the existing claims of Ukraine and the West that the rebels fired on the MH17 jet with an advanced surface-to-air "Buk" missile, supplied by Russia. The German agency also said the photos and other images supplied by Ukraine was manipulated.

Russia had been denying the charge of having supplied the missile to the rebels and made the counter charge that Ukrainian fighter jets shadowed the Malaysian jetliner and fired it with mounted guns. Or it may have also been a missile system controlled by the Ukrainian forces that hit the plane.

The testimony by Gerhard Schindler, head of BND, refutes Russia's claims that the missile was fired by Ukrainian troops and Ukrainian warplanes tailed the jet. Schindler said the agency's inference is that a missile was fired from a Buk system, presumably captured by the rebels from a Ukrainian base. It might have exploded next to the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, breaking the plane into pieces and making it fall all over the villages near the town of Torez, Spiegel reported.

Evidence Of Missile

The BND report also referred to the heroic claims made by some rebel commanders, regarding the capture of hi-tech missiles, a few days before the plane was shot down. It mentioned a particular video, in which Russian nationalist and separatist supporter Sergei Kurginyan saying how they hired a specialist to repair a Buk system, seized by the rebels in Donetsk.

Though Kiev denied the separatists' claim of taking the Buk missile systems from Ukraine's armoury, two officials in Ukraine's security establishment confirmed that the separatists had four Ukrainian Buk missile systems in their possession, days before the airliner was downed, reported Mashable. The officials, who spoke on anonymity, confided that the missile systems were from the Ukrainian military facilities located in the eastern region.

Some intercepted phone conversations of pro-Russian separatists by Ukrainian security services also gave credence to the theory that the rebels were behind the shooting down of Flight MH17. The Security Service of Ukraine, (SBU) had released a bunch of recorded conversations to the media, purportedly between Russian military intelligence officers and Russian-backed Cossack militants, soon after the aircrash .