"We shot down a Kiev plane, our superiors told us," said the pro-Russian rebel, who worked locally as a miner before the uprising in eastern Ukraine. " We thought we were looking for bailed-out Ukrainian pilots but instead we found dead civilians ... All those poor people with baggage that certainly wasn’t military.”

“My men and I were looking for parachutes on the ground and in the trees," the militiaman said. "All of a sudden, I saw scraps of material in a clearing. Underneath I found the body of a little girl [...] It was awful. That was when I realized it was a civilian plane. Not a military one. And all these dead people were civilians. A heap of burst suitcases confirmed it.”

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-rebel-describes-witnessing-mh17-145751384.html