International
Three soldiers convicted of 298 murders, aeroplane crash─── 06:04 Fri, 18 Nov 2022
Three soldiers in a pro-Russian separatist army have been convicted of murder over the deaths of 298 people onboard flight MH17 in 2014.
Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, were found guilty of 298 counts of murder and "unlawfully causing an aeroplane to crash" by the Hague District Court at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The fourth defendant, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted after the court found he had no prior knowledge of the plan to fire the missile. Nor did he have the authority to overrule Dubinskiy's order to fire the missile, the court stated.
Compensation totalling €16m will also be handed to victims' family members. Prosecutors and the suspects have two weeks to file an appeal against the guilty verdicts.
Hague District Court judge Hendrik Steenhuis found that MH17 was brought down in July 2014 by a Russian Buk missile fired from a Kremlin-occupied region of eastern Ukraine.
