On June 19, the international Joint Investigation Team has named four people allegedly responsible for downing the civilian MH17 flight over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
A Russian-made BUK missile downed the Malaysian Airlines plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala-Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. Russia has denied its involvement in the attack, despite evidence that the missile launcher was brought from Russia.
Now the official investigation named four men suspected of the attack, three of them Russian citizens.
The key suspects in the downing of the MH17 flight are Igor Girkin (Russian citizen), Sergey Dubinskiy (Russian citizen), Oleg Pulatov (Russian citizen), and Leonid Kharchenko (Ukrainian citizen).
The investigators specified that the suspects have been listed not because of their actual perpetration of the crime, but because of their substantial contributions to making it possible. The Dutch legislation is as strict on the perpetrators, as on the organizers of a crime.
There will be an international arrest warrant for the four suspects.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who was participating in the investigators’ press conference in the Netherlands on June 19, said that Ukraine will do its best to arrest the Ukrainian suspect, Kharchenko. If found guilty, Kharchenko would serve the sentence in a Ukrainian prison, according to Lutsenko.
As the next step, the Dutch prosecutors will submit the case to the Dutch court. The court proceedings are to start by March 2020.
The Joint Investigation Team comprises officials from the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and the Dutch police, along with police and criminal justice authorities from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.
