Investigators of a 2014 crash of a Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing MH17 believe the four suspects they have named responsible for bringing a Buk system to the launch site, a representative of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) whose conclusions have already been questioned by Russia in the past, said Wednesday
NIEUWEGEIN (The Netherlands) (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 19th June, 2019) Investigators of a 2014 crash of a Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing MH17 believe the four suspects they have named responsible for bringing a Buk system to the launch site, a representative of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) whose conclusions have already been questioned by Russia in the past, said Wednesday."The public prosecution service suspects the four suspects of the fact that their plan, their cooperation, their acts on and around July [17] 2014 have led to the shooting of the flight MH17. Even though they have not pushed the button themselves, there is a suspicion that they have closely cooperated in order to obtain the Buk TELAR and put it in position on the launch site with the goal to shoot a plane," Dutch Chief Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke told a press conference.
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, mostly from the Netherlands, 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 altitude.
The Dutch-led joint investigation team, which does not include Russia, concluded 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 of the crash in the east of Ukraine, and Moscow could only recognize the results of the probe if it was a full-fledged participant.
