The Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose conclusions have been criticized by Russia in the past, will continue a probe into a 2014 crash of a Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing MH17 even though it has decided to bring charges against four suspects, a JIT representative said Wednesday
NIEUWEGEIN (The Netherlands) (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 19th June, 2019) The Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose conclusions have been criticized by Russia in the past, will continue a probe into a 2014 crash of a Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing MH17 even though it has decided to bring charges against four suspects, a JIT representative said Wednesday."We are still gathering new data for investigation, because we will start prosecuting now, but the investigation will continue," a representative of the JIT told a press conference.
"Today we will send out international arrest warrants for the four suspects that we will prosecute. They will also be placed on national and international wanted lists. The four persons are Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, Oleg Pulatov and Leonid Kharchenko," he added.
The court hearings on the case will begin on March 9, 2020, according to the JIT.
The Boeing, which was on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. All 298 people who were on board the plane were killed. Kiev blamed local militia for the crash, but they said they had no equipment that would allow them to down a plane at that height.
The Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), which does not include Russia, made a preliminary conclusion that the plane had been allegedly downed by a Buk missile that belonged to the Russian Armed Forces. Russia has stressed that it gave the Netherlands radar data and documents proving that the missile belonged to Ukraine, but the information was not taken into account.
The Russian Defense Ministry has said that all missiles like the one, whose engine the Dutch-led commission showed, were decommissioned after 2011.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that the accusations against Russia were baseless and the investigation was biased and one-sided. Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out that Russia was excluded from an investigation into the crash in the east of Ukraine, and Moscow could only recognize the results of the probe if it was a full-fledged participant.
