A Dutch court docket has convicted three males of homicide for his or her function in taking pictures down Malaysia Airways Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 and sentenced them to life in jail. A fourth man was acquitted.
“Solely essentially the most extreme punishment is becoming to retaliate for what the suspects have achieved, which has triggered a lot struggling to so many victims and so many surviving kinfolk,” presiding Decide Hendrik Steenhuis mentioned on Thursday.
MH17, a passenger flight, was shot down over japanese Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 individuals on board.
Households of the victims wept within the courtroom as Steenhuis learn the decision.
The three males convicted in absentia had been former Russian intelligence brokers Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian separatist chief.
The three had been all discovered to have helped organize the transport of a Russian navy BUK missile system into Ukraine that was used to shoot down the aircraft though they weren’t those who truly fired the missile.
They’re fugitives and believed to be in Russia. Extradition is taken into account unlikely.
A fourth suspect, Russian Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted on all fees.
The missile left the aircraft’s wreckage and victims’ stays scattered throughout cornfields. The world on the time was the scene of preventing between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces, the precursor of this 12 months’s battle.
“The households of victims needed the reality and so they needed justice to be achieved and people accountable to be punished, and that’s what occurred. I’m fairly happy,” Piet Ploeg, who heads a basis representing the victims, instructed the Reuters information company. Ploeg’s brother, his brother’s spouse and his nephew died on MH17.
The judgement included a 16-million-euro ($16.5m) award for damages to victims that will likely be paid by the Dutch state if it isn’t paid by the convicted males.