Ukraine, three sentences in the Netherlands for the shooting down of a flight MH17
A Dutch court has convicted three of the four accused of theShooting down of Malaysia Airliens Boeing 777 MH17 over eastern Ukrainian airspace in July 2014 in which all 298 people on board were killed.
THE Russians Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinski and theUkrainian Leonid Kharchenko They were condemned convicted of voluntary manslaughter by shooting down the aircraft, while the Russian Oleg Pulatov was acquitted, according to the ruling read out by Judge Hendrik Steenhuis. The three convicts, the sentence provides, will also have to pay together 16 million euros plus interest to the relatives of the victims.
Girkin, Dubinsky and Kharchenko were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia
Indeed, none of the defendants showed up at the maximum security court in the Netherlands for the verdictwhile dozens of families traveled from all over the world to hear the sentence after a two-and-a-half-year trial.
The Boeing 777departed from Amsterdam Schipol to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down on July 17, 2014while it was in the sky over eastern Ukraine, by a Buk-type missile fired from Pervomaisk, a location in the Lugansk district, at the time of the downing under the control of pro-Russian separatist militants.
The four were accused of having transported the missile, not of having fired it, none of them however is in the hands of the authorities and only one was represented by a lawyer, through whom he accuses the court to have one preconceived view against Russia. Thesis also supported by Moscow, which has repeatedly questioned the elements that have emerged in these years of investigation and trial.
Prosecutors had asked for life sentences for the suspects, but the three are now unlikely to serve their sentences. Piet Ploegpresident of the MH17 foundation, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and nephew, outside the court he hoped that the verdict could help families move forward.
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