WASHINGTON — A Malaysia Airliner was hit by a missile, American officials said. The plane was traveling at about 30,000 feet, according to information from a military spy satellite. The satellite was unable to detect where exactly the missile was fired. The Malaysia Airlines was a Boeing 777 with 295 people aboard crashed in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border on Thursday, and Ukrainian officials said it may have been shot down, possibly by a Russian-made antiaircraft system.
Ukraine’s President, Petro O. Poroshenko, said in a statement that he was calling for an immediate investigation of the crash of the plane, which was en route to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from Amsterdam. There were no reported survivors among the 280 passengers and 15 crew members.
A regional airline official said the plane had been flying at about 33,000 feet when radar trackers lost it over eastern Ukraine near the Russian border.
Eastern Ukraine has been roiled for months by a violent pro-Russian separatist uprising in which a number of military aircraft have been downed. But this would be the first commercial airline disaster resulting from the hostilities.
Malaysia Airlines, still reeling from the mysterious loss of another Boeing 777 flight in March, said it had lost contact with the flight, MH17, over Ukraine but offered no further details immediately. Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, said in a Twitter post that he was “shocked by reports that an MH plane crashed. We are launching an immediate investigation.”
President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke by telephone, and Mr. Putin raised the issue of the reports of the downed plane, White House officials said. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Obama was also briefed separately about the downed Malaysian plane.
By early evening, images surfaced online that purported to show the debris in the green fields of eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper published on its website a photograph posted earlier to a social networking site showing a fragment of a passenger airplane’s fuselage, painted in the red and blue of Malaysia Airlines, in a grassy field. Lifenews, a Russian online television site, put up an image of blackened, smoking wreckage.
Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the insurgent group in eastern Ukraine, denied in a telephone interview that the rebels had anything to do with the downing of the passenger jet. He said the rebels had shot down Ukrainian planes before but that their antiaircraft weapons could only reach to around 4,000 meters, far below the level of passenger jets.
“We don’t have the technical ability to hit a plane at that height,” he said. He said the plane apparently came down in an area of Ukrainian military operations and that it was not out of the question that Ukrainians themselves shot it down.
Anton Geraschenko, an adviser at the Ukraine Interior Ministry, posted on his Facebook page that the airliner had been brought down by a Russian-made Buk, or Beech, antiaircraft system. Russian missile systems are named for trees.
A reference book published by Rosoboronexport, the Russian state weapons export monopoly, describes the Buk antiaircraft missile system as designed to target both low- and high-flying aircraft, to a maximum height of 72,000 feet.
Mr. Geraschenko wrote that earlier Thursday people in eastern Ukraine supporting the central government had reported seeing a Buk system moved from the town of Torez toward the town of Snezhnoye.
A commander of a rebel unit in Donetsk, said, “we could have shot down three planes over Donetsk yesterday but we didn’t because they could have been civilians.” He said the rebel forces didn’t have the BUK system that would be capable of shooting it down.
President Barack Obama made his first comments Thursday on the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine, saying the incident “looks like it may be a terrible tragedy.”
The administration is “working to determine whether there were American citizens on board; that is our first priority.” The President did not confirm any details of the crash and said he has asked his aides to keep in contact with Ukrainian officials.
