MH17 verdict: Three men found guilty of downing flight

A Dutch criminal court has found three former senior pro-Russian separatists guilty of shooting down passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. These were two former Russian intelligence agents and a Ukrainian separatist. They all received life sentences and are expected to pay at least 16 million euros to the victims’ relatives.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down over a contested area in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All passengers and crew members, 298 people, died at that time.

Since most of the victims came from the Netherlands, the trial also takes place there. The three perpetrators have gone into hiding and are believed to be in Russia. An extradition should not take place. The court announced the verdict on Thursday afternoon in the absence of the defendants. A fourth man was acquitted.

In addition, the court confirmed the course of events – and thus the work of international investigators -: the passenger plane was clearly equipped with a Russian type anti-aircraft missile book been shot down. The rocket was fired from a field in an area controlled by separatists. The anti-aircraft gun was therefore brought from a Russian military base to Ukraine and returned after it was shot down.

The court also noted that as of May 2014, the conflict region in eastern Ukraine and the rebels were effectively under Russian control. The accused had denied their guilt, and the Kremlin had also rejected the participation of Russian citizens and accused the judiciary of “unfounded allegations”.

“The country must not extradite its own citizens,” says Marieke de Hoon, a lecturer in international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam. Because all attempts to bring the case before an international court had failed because of the Kremlin’s resistance, the only option left for the Netherlands was to open criminal proceedings against these men at home.

The 298 victims came from ten different countries, four of them from Germany. The relatives of the victims are traumatized, but not only they: in the Netherlands, the shooting down of the plane and the denial of the Kremlin triggered a collective trauma and strained relations with Russia even before the war of aggression against Ukraine. The question of what role Russia played in the accident is therefore particularly important to the relatives.

Intensive work was done to clarify the case. An international team of investigators carried out extensive forensic investigations until it was clear: the missile that hit the plane was fired by a Buk-M1 Telar anti-aircraft system. It came from Russia’s 53rd Air Defense Brigade in Kursk, Russia, near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne, where fierce fighting was going on at the time.

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