A Dutch court has found three men guilty of the murder of 298 people on board flight MH17, which was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile when it was flying over eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Russian nationals Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko were found guilty by the court.
A third Russian national, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted of the charges.
In 2014, they were fighters for the pro-Russian separatist movement, the Donetsk People’s Republic. None of the men appeared in court and only Pulatov chose to appoint lawyers, who pleaded not guilty on his behalf.
The court on Thursday said Russia had overall control of the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine at the time when the plane was shot down.
The verdict caps a 32-month trial that began in March 2020 in a courtroom close to Schiphol airport, where flight MH17 took off on 17 July 2014 bound for Kuala Lumpur.
Only a few hours into the flight, a missile exploded just above and to the left of the cockpit, causing the plane to break up in midair, according to an international investigation. Everyone on board was killed.
The victims came from 17 countries, including 198 Dutch nationals, 43 Malaysians, 38 Australians and 10 from the UK.
Credit: theguardian.com
