A Dutch court has found three men guilty of the murder of 298 people onboard flight MH17 over the skies of Ukraine in 2014 have concluded that it was brought down by a Buk missile fired from Russian-controlled territory.
Three of the four men on trial in the Netherlands for shooting down flight MH17 in 2014 have been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but the fourth has been acquitted on all charges, Dutch News.nl reports.
Sentencing Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko to life in jail, the court said there was an ‘overwhelming amount of evidence’ that MH17 had been brought down by a Buk missile, the report said.
The court found no evidence against the fourth person, a Russian national Oleg Pulatov.
According to Dutch News, the court documents do not show who gave the order to fire the missile and why that happened, nor who the crew was, the court said. ‘But anyone who used such a weapon will be aware of the enormous consequences it could have,’ the court said. ‘A weapon is not fired by accident. It may have been a mistake to hit the plane, but that does not detract from the intention.’
The official investigation concluded in 2016 that the plane was shot down from Ukrainian farmland by a BUK missile ‘controlled by pro-Russian fighters’. That conclusion has been disputed by Russia, which claims that Ukrainian fighters were responsible. The passengers and crew came from 17 different countries and included 196 Dutch nationals, the report noted.