A Malaysia Airlines passenger jet crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, prompting a Ukrainian official to say that the flight carrying 295 people had been "shot down."

"Terrorists" fired on the plane operating a Buk surface-to-air missile system, according to a Facebook post from Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

The plane, a Boeing 777, went down near the town of Torez in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, according to the post, as it flew at about 10,000 meters (nearly 33,000 feet).


"We do not exclude that the plane was shot down and confirm that the Ukraine Armed Forces did not fire at any targets in the sky," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said, according to his website.

He also said he has expressed condolences to Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte about Flight 17, which was headed from Amsterdam to Malaysia. He said he invites Dutch experts to participate in the investigation of the crash, emphasizing that he does not call it an "incident" or a "catastrophe," but a "terrorist action."

Details of the incident are quickly pouring in about Thursday's crash which comes the same week that Ukrainian officials said a Russian fighter shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane while the aircraft was in Ukrainian airspace.

As news broke of the crash, Malaysia Airlines confirmed in a tweet that it lost contact with Flight 17 and that the jet's last known position was over Ukrainian airspace.

CNN's Richard Quest, an aviation expert, said that it would be "extremely unusual" for an airliner at 32,000 feet to be shot down. From the ground, one could simply look up and tell whether a plane was a commercial aircraft.

"It looks like a commercial aircraft, it squawks a commercial aircraft. So something is absolutely appalling that's gone on here," he said.

Reports are still coming in about who may have been on board and where they're from.