It ended with the conviction of three of the four defendants in absentia the trial in the Netherlands for theFlight MH17 shot down of Malaysia Airlines in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. They were found guilty of killing 298 passengers and crew on board the plane the two Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinsky and the Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko while the Russian Oleg Pulatov was acquitted.
The international investigation into the tragedy had established that the plane had been shot down by a missile supplied by Moscow launched from a camp in Pervomaisk, then controlled by pro-Russian militias, a thesis accepted in the trial which closes today.
“The court finds that flight MH17 was shot down incontrovertibly by the launch of a Buk missile from a field near Pervomaisk resulting in the deaths of all 283 passengers and 15 crew members,” said Dutch judge Hendrik Steenhuis.
“The decision of the Court in The Hague, the first sentence against the perpetrators of the downing of flight MH17, is important,” wrote Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky emphasizing however that “hold convicted persons to account it is equally crucial, given that the sense of impunity causes new crimes. We must dispel this illusion. Retribution for all the atrocities of the Russian Federation is now as inevitable as then,” he added.
#Flight #MH17 #trial #plane #shot #Buk #missile #Russians #Ukrainian #convicted