MOSCOW, June 3 (RAPSI) – Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Wednesday that Yevgeny Agapov, former Ukrainian Air Force mechanic, is a key witness to MH17 crash in Donbas last July.

Agapov had crossed into Russia after the crash and expressed willingness to cooperate with Russian authorities, according to Investigative Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin.

Agapov was given a cover name for safety reasons, and Russia’s investigative authorities checked his information, including by subjecting him to a lie detector test.

“Since we have new proof that he has told us the truth, and considering various stories planted in the media claiming that our witness is an imaginary character, we have decided to disclose information about him,” Markin said.

Markin recalled that according to the witness, an Su-25 aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force piloted by Captain Vladislav Voloshin took off on a combat mission from an airfield near Dnepropetrovsk, where the witness was deployed, in the afternoon of July 17, 2014.

According to the witness, he “personally saw Voloshin’s plane armed with air-to-air missiles, which are usually not mounted on Su-25 planes under ordinary conditions.”

“His aircraft returned to the airfield without one of the missiles, and Voloshin told his colleagues that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The witness later learned that a civilian Malaysian aircraft with passengers on board crashed that day,” Markin said.

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk region on July 17, 2014. All 298 people on board, including 193 Dutch nationals, died.