AMSTERDAM (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th April, 2021) The District Court of The Hague cannot raise the issue of Kiev's responsibility for failing to properly close the airspace on the day of the MH17 Boeing crash case during the trial, this is the task of the prosecution, judge Maria Kneif said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
"It is good to keep in mind that only thing that the court needs to answer in that criminal case is the claim of the public prosecution service against the accused whether they are responsible for this," Kneif said, when asked why the court decided not to hold Ukraine responsible for the non-closure of the airspace.
According to the judge, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service may raise any questions before the court, but in this trial it raised only one question: whether the four defendants � Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko � can be held responsible for the crash.
"The question before the court here is whether the accused can be held responsible for the crash of the MH17, which is what the court has been tasked about. So the other questions need to be asked by others but it's not the task before the court. If we are talking about this case, any questions could be put by the public prosecution service. As for the Dutch government, why it decides or does not decide certain things, the government could be asked this questions," Kneif added.
In July 2020, the Dutch Foreign Ministry told Sputnik that the Flight Safety Foundation was carrying out an investigation into why Kiev did not close the airspace for civilian aircraft over eastern Ukraine where the flight MH17 crashed. In February, the Dutch government announced, after studying a report by the Flight Safety Foundation that conducted a probe into 34 crashes of civilian planes over conflict zones from 1985 to 2020, that there were no convincing legal grounds to hold Kiev responsible for the non-closure.
