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An international criminal investigation into the shooting down of flight MH17 is likely to conclude that the plane was downed by a Buk missile fired from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, diplomats say.
The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) has been gathering evidence for a possible criminal trial and is due to present its interim findings on Wednesday. Dutch police and prosecutors have been working with judicial colleagues from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.
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The report follows an earlier inquiry by the Dutch Safety Board. It concluded a missile fired by a sophisticated Buk surface-to-air system struck the Malaysia Airlines aircraft as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. It exploded next to the cockpit. All 298 people on board were killed.
According to diplomatic sources, international investigators will give a precise Google location showing that the Buk was located in separatist-controlled territory, near the village of Snizhne.
The JIT has been working on the scenario that the Buk came from the Kremlin’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade based in the Russian city of Kursk. It was smuggled across the Russian-Ukrainian border in July 2014 and spotted leaving rebel-held Donetsk on a low-loader, heading east.
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Van de Roer said he was pessimistic that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would cooperate with the tribunal or hand over possible suspects to the Hague for trial. He also described the Dutch government’s approach as “bureaucratic and legalisticâ€.
“My fear is that this will end up as a kind of Lockerbie,†he said, adding that in the case of the 1988 Pan Am bombing it was never known if Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – convicted in 2001 – was the only perpetrator.
“The simple question is what will [British foreign secretary] Boris Johnson do? He has talked harsh words in the last few days over Russia in Syria. Will he be just as tough with the Russians over MH17?â€
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Russia has vehemently denied responsibility. On Monday its ministry of defence released satellite data which it said proved the missile had not been fired from rebel territory. It suggested Ukraine was responsible.
In 2014, however, the same ministry claimed a mysterious Ukrainian fighter jet had shot down the Boeing 777. The “jet†disappeared from Russia’s latest presentation. MH17’s route had also changed.
PS.
Q. How do you know Russians are lying?
A. Their lips move.
Well, if an airliner is downed, look into the past of the potential actors.
Hasn't Ukraine shot down civilian planes before in the recent past? Why did Kiev ATC suddenly route a plane over Donbass after weeks of routing them south away from the region? Why won't Dutch authorities release the black box and open it up for open source analysis?
Why would Donbass rebels hand over the black box to the Dutch if it was incriminating? Why let various organizations tramp over the crashsite gathering evidence? Why not claim it couldn't be found? Why not say "Whoops, we took it all to scrapyard, so sorry!"
What incentive do the Russians or Donbass Rebels have for shooting down an airliner?
Now, what incentive does the anti-Russian, anti-Donbass, "Social National" government have for shooting down an airliner near the Donbass?
thunderlips11 is from Olgino says
Well, if an airliner is downed, look into the past of the potential actors.
Yep, Russia has once downed a civilian aircraft in cold blood. Does KAL 007 ring any bells? I bet it does.
thunderlips11 is from Olgino says
Hasn't Ukraine ...? Why...? Why won't ...?
Why would ...? Why let ..? Why not ...? Why not say ...
What incentive ...?
Now, what incentive ...?
Russians are good at generating bazillions of questions and loony "versions" in attempt of drowning the issue in the sea of bullshit. Actually, famous for it as one of their favorite propaganda techniques. It doesn't matter in a criminal investigation though.
It's all DNC Propaganda to distract from their failures in the Middle East and the Email Scandals.
A real passenger manifest - not the fake one provided - would tell us which enemies of Putin conspired to fabricate this false-flag event.
The investigation group has been contacted by at least 10 witnesses - all Russian citizens - who claim they either witnessed or took part in the downing of the MH17. The clock is ticking...
Keep the F-35 "Lead Sled II" "Century Series for the 21st Century" alive!!
Thunderlips Russian Agent 0069 says
Keep the F-35 "Lead Sled II" "Century Series for the 21st Century" alive!!
Not complaining about investigation being "too slow" anymore?
It's takes time to tendentiously write a report and find replacement experts for the ones who quit in disgust.
The court of justice of the EU: Russia is supplying heavy weapons in the Donbass
The European court of General jurisdiction recognized the validity of sanctions against the Russian company Almaz-Antey, engaged in the manufacture of heavy weapons that Russia supplies militants in the Donbass. About this on his page in Facebook said the Deputy Minister of justice of Ukraine on European integration Sergei Petukhov, placing a link on the court’s decision.
Almaz-Antey has decided to challenge the sanctions imposed by the European Union. The court recognized the validity of this decision.
In the text of the court decision dated 25 January 2017, said, “Almaz-Antei is a Russian state company. It produces anti-aircraft weapons, including missiles surface-to-air, which are supplied to the Russian army. The Russian authorities have supplied heavy weapons to the separatists in Eastern Ukraine, contributing to the destabilization of Ukraine. It is a weapon used by the separatists, including to shoot down aircraft. Consequently, the company Almaz-Antey contributes to the destabilization of Ukraineâ€.
“The court rejects the appeal of the Almaz-Antei and, thus, supports the freezing of funds of this company,†– said in the text.
http://24-my.info/the-court-of-justice-of-the-eu-russia-is-supplying-heavy-weapons-in-the-donbass/
Did Eurocrats resolve what "Abnormal Curvature of Bananas" means yet?
Today was the last day of the mh17 trial. The verdict is due in November or December 2022.
A Dutch court has found three men guilty of murder for shooting down a passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people.
The court found that a Russian-made missile supplied from Russia and fired by an armed group under Russian control brought down flight MH17.
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The missile attack was one of the most notorious war crimes in Ukraine before allegations of atrocities there became an almost daily reality.
Many of the victims' relatives believe if the world had reacted differently, and taken a tougher stance against Russia eight years ago, the invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical instability that has followed could have been avoided.
The judges ruled that it was a deliberate action to bring down a plane, even though the three found guilty had intended to shoot down a military not a civilian aircraft.
- Igor Girkin*, the military leader of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic, was convicted of deploying the missile and seeking Russian help
- Sergei Dubinsky** was found to have ordered and overseen the transport of the Buk missile launcher
- Leonid Kharchenko was found to have overseen the Buk, acting on Dubinsky's instructions.
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It has never been determined how the KAL flight ended up nearly 200 miles off course.
Who shot down NH17? Ukraine.
Who is responsible? Russia!
Human rights trial against Russia over downing of flight MH17 to go ahead
Judges rule Russia eligible for trial for alleged war crimes in Ukraine because of its effective control over separatist-held areas
Haroon Siddique
Human rights judges have said cases against Russia for the shooting down of flight MH17 and other alleged war crimes can proceed to trial, as they ruled that separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine were under the effective control of the Russian Federation.
All 298 people onboard the Malaysian airlines flight travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed when it was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile while flying over eastern Ukraine in 2014 during the war in Donbas.
The Netherlands, whose citizens accounted for 196 of those killed, is seeking to bring a case against Russia for violations of the European convention on human rights in relation to the atrocity.
On Wednesday, the European court of human rights (ECHR) ruled that it could proceed as Russia had effective control over separatist areas in eastern Ukraine from 11 May 2014 until at least 26 January 2022 (when the admissibility hearing in the case took place). The judges cited Russia’s military presence in the region, its degree of influence over the separatists’ military strategy, the supply of weapons and military equipment to them, as well as political support.
The ECHR said the fact that Russia ceased to be a party to the European convention on human rights in September was irrelevant, as the events took place prior to that date.
The Dutch justice minister, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, tweeted: “Very good news: the judgment of the European court of human rights is another important step in finding the truth and justice for the victims and their relatives of flight.”
The Strasbourg court reached the same conclusions in relation to applications by the government of Ukraine in relation to the conflict in Donbas, including alleged unlawful military attacks against civilians and torture of civilians and Ukrainian soldiers. However, the judges said that whether complaints about the bombing and shelling of areas outside separatist – and effective Russian – control could fall within Russian jurisdiction would need to be examined at trial.
They noted that there are around 8,500 individual applications pending in relation to events in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, the Sea of Azov and the invasion by Russia which began in February 2022.
Ben Emmerson KC, international counsel for the government of Ukraine, said the ECHR judgment “shows that President Putin cannot escape the long arm of international law”.
Human rights trial against Russia over downing of flight MH17 to go ahead
There are strong indications to believe that the decision to supply the Buk anti-aircraft missile system to militants of the "Donetsk People's Republic" was made by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Source: Conclusion of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT)
Details: The Team has published the results of its investigation into who was responsible in the Russian Federation for the downing of flight MH17 by a Buk missile.
In recorded phone conversations, Russian officials say that the decision to provide military support rested with the president. The decision was even postponed for a week "because there is only one person who can make the decision... the person who is now at a summit in France." At the time, on 5 and 6 June 2014, President Putin was in France to celebrate D-Day [the Normandy landings], the anniversary of the massive Allied landing during World War II.
"There is specific information that the separatists' request was passed on to the president and that this request was granted. It is not known whether the request mentions the Buk system. A little later, heavier air defence systems appeared, including the Buk system that shot down MH17. Although we are talking about hard evidence, the high bar of complete and convincing evidence has not been met. In addition, the president enjoys immunity as head of state," the report says.
The JIT shared its findings with the families of 298 victims and published a report.
Source: Conclusion of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT)
MH17 was warning shot from Putin. We should have acted, say generals
Ten years after Malaysia Airlines jet was downed over Ukraine, military figures rue missed chances to stem Russian aggression — while families of victims still wait for justice
The teenage girls who ran for their lives from a café as Russian missiles landed nearby on Tuesday would have been small children when the sounds of war first came to their home.
In the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin’s troops first arrived a decade ago in unmarked uniforms and under the thin disguise of a local insurrection.
Spurred on by the reverberating impacts, Tuesday’s salvo was over for the girls before they could even reach a bomb shelter, but this time they escaped unscathed — they even giggled as they ran.
They were too young to remember July 17, 2014, when a Boeing 777 came crashing out of the air in flames, brought down by one of the first Russian missiles to fly in anger over the Donbas.
On this day ten years ago, 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 were killed as they travelled 30,000ft above sea level through Ukrainian airspace from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Eighty of them were children, including three British boys aged eight to 14 — Christopher, Julian and Ian Allen. The youngest victim, Kaela Goes, was 21 months old, killed while flying home with her parents after visiting relatives in the Netherlands.
They were expecting the adventure of a holiday, to see friends or to be reunited with loved ones. Instead, their bodies dropped out of the air on to sunflower fields torn up by tank tracks. One body fell through a villager’s roof. Intimate belongings from their luggage were scattered over 20 square miles, only to be looted by soldiers under Russian command.
The mass murder of European citizens should have hardened the West’s response to persistent Russian aggression, pre-empting President Putin’s 2022 invasion with sweeping sanctions and increasing military aid to Ukraine, according to Nato and Ukrainian officers who served at the time.
The population of Ukraine’s eastern region are still paying the price for the world’s failure to respond to the downing of MH17, or to even earlier provocations by the Kremlin.
“The first mistake the West made was in not responding to the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. Of course, in 2014, there was a second new stage — Crimea and Donbas,” Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Dubey said this week. A Ukrainian career commander who has been fighting the Russians in the Donbas since 2014, he remembers the horror of discovering that a civilian passenger jet had been shot down, and the scenes of mixed-up human remains in the chaos of the crash site, some of them from small children.
“I think for a moment after MH17 it seemed like even the Russians were scared, they realised that they had crossed beyond all moral boundaries,” Dubey said.
The Kremlin swiftly started a disinformation campaign, offering a series of improbable explanations to claim that Ukraine had brought down MH17, even though a Russian commander, Igor Girkin, had bragged that they had downed a plane he believed to have been a Ukrainian military troop transport.
“Then they calmly lied through it and the world let them move on,” Dubey said. “If the West had wanted to support democratic nations, it should have provided us more military aid. Then we would have stopped the Russians when they started this invasion.”
A smattering of sanctions were introduced against Russia immediately after of the crash, but the world’s politicians, in thrall to Russian oil and gas money, largely abdicated their responsibility in favour of the slow and ineffective wheels of the international justice system.
Commemorations will be held for the victims today. But ten years after the catastrophe, none of the victims’ families has received justice. A joint investigation into the incident by Ukraine, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Malaysia established that a Russian Buk anti-aircraft system shot the plane down from occupied territory and was transported into Ukraine by members of Russia’s 53rd air defence brigade, posted near the border.
Girkin, another Russian commander, and one local were convicted and sentenced in absentia to life in prison for their role in shooting down the plane. As they are in Russia, however, they are unlikely ever to serve their sentences.
The joint investigation closed last year. The Russian soldiers suspected to have launched the Buk anti-aircraft missile and their more senior commanders, including Putin, will never be held to account. The joint investigation team is bound not to disclose all the evidence it has received.
“We have a lot of information in our materials that indicates important data of other persons before this tragedy, but it is not enough to bring them to justice,” Oleksandr Bannyk, Ukraine’s prosecutor at the Hague, said. “We cannot disclose specific names and specific information, taking into account the fact that any persons involved in this event are considered innocent until proven guilty in court.”
In a civil claim filed against Russia by several of the victims’ families, the American attorney Jerry Skinner sought $10 million (£7.7 million) compensation for each victim, the same amount awarded to families of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing by Libya. To date, the families who filed the claims have received only $100,000, from the airline.
Skinner argues that frozen Russian assets should be used to compensate the victims’ families. He accuses the Netherlands of putting its own claim for damages — mainly costs incurred during the recovery of bodies and its investigation — ahead of those of the families. He said the European court has refused to file his pleadings.
Today Dubey’s troops, from the 32nd Mechanised Brigade, are clinging on to defensive lines around the besieged city of Toretsk, the new focus of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. A decade after it was liberated from Putin’s proxy forces in the Donbas, it looks likely to be occupied again.
General Ben Hodges, commander of the US army in Europe in 2014, also believes that the West might have reacted more forcefully to the downing of MH17 by imposing crippling sanctions and increasingly military aid to Ukraine as it battled Putin’s original hybrid invasion of the Donbas.
“This war in Ukraine is what failed deterrence looks like,” said Hodges, who has long argued that President Biden’s administration should lift restrictions on the use of long-range weapons against military targets inside Russia.
The mistakes of President Obama’s administration a decade ago were being repeated by Biden, his former vice-president, Hodges said. “Our continued failure to respond to Russian aggression is why we are where we are.”
"MH17 was warning shot from Putin. We should have acted, say generals"
It's almost a year since the act of terror has been committed. The investigation is nearing its conclusion. Malaysia is asking for UN to set up an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected in downing the plane and Russia is suddenly against it and threatens to veto. They had so many "versions" backed by so much "evidence", were so eager for the investigation to be finished, screaming non-stop "why it takes so long?" and "are we there yet?" since last July, but now they don't want to punish these horrible terrorist fascist Nazis anymore and want the whole thing to just go away. What gives?
And why does Russia even care one way or another: it wasn't their plane, no Russian citizens were on board, it was downed not in their airspace, etc. Looks like tacit admission that they were indeed involved. Isn't it ironic that the guy who was so obsessed with the fate of Gaddafi now has his own Lockerbie?
#crime