The Bellingat Podcast contains materials some may find disturbing.

Listen and discretion is advised. Around 420 PM Ukraine time on the 17th July 2014, the missile detonates just to the left of the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines

flight 17. A split second later, hundreds of high energy fragments pierced the fuselage.

Shrapnel tears through the bodies of the two pilots and one crew member, killing them instantly.

There's no Mayday call, no attempt to maneuver. From the moment of the explosion you have the crew at the front of the airplane.

They get multiple shrapnel wounds they will die of those instantly.

David Leve is an aviation safety investigator at Luffborough University.

Then you get some passengers have bits of shrapnel pass through them.

I think one still had some lodged in them from the body parts that were recovered.

You have the effect of the cold, the lack of pressure

means that you can't breathe at that stage, you pass out very quickly.

You have wind-related injuries and impact injuries as you start to go a little bit higher than your blood boils.

So there's all sorts of physiological effects which kill you very very quickly at that time. I'm Elliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative journalism collective Balincat

and you're listening to the Balincat podcast season 1, MH17 episode 3, the murder weapon.

So far in this series we've looked at the crash site from the ground

a medieval painting of hell as one onlooker put it the calmness of hundreds of

naked bodies that dotted the fields drunken soldiers in beekeeper suits standing guard,

brandishing machine guns,

the ghost train that came to take the bodies away

and the all pervasive stench of death.

Next we heard the Russian side of the story, their press conference,

the Dr Strange-Lof briefing room,

...