Four defendants in the MH17 crash case Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko deliberately downed the plane mistaking it for a Ukrainian Air Force aircraft, Dutch Prosecutor Thijs Berger said during court hearings on Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th June, 2020) Four defendants in the MH17 crash case Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko deliberately downed the plane mistaking it for a Ukrainian Air Force aircraft, Dutch Prosecutor Thijs Berger said during court hearings on Wednesday.
The hearings into the MH17 crash were renewed on June 8 in the Netherlands.
"As we indicated before, files include several indications that it was precisely their intention to down a military aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force. We can deduce this from intercepted conversations of the accused after the downing of MH17," Berger stated.
The prosecutor stated that Girkin, Dubinsky, Pulatov and Kharchenko might have played a key role in deploying Buk missile that downed the MH17 flight. Berger noted that Buk's crew also contributed to the crash, adding that the investigation into their actions was ongoing.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people aboard. The accident is being investigated by Dutch prosecutors and the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which claim that the plane was hit by Russia's Buk missile. Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in the incident, saying that the JIT had not presented a shred of evidence to support its claims.
