8 years later, Dutch judges to pass verdicts in MH17 trial
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch judges are set to deliver their verdict Thursday in the trial in absentia of three Russians and a Ukrainian over their alleged roles in the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet and the deaths of all 298 people on board.
The judgment will come more than eight years after the airliner traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, during a conflict between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian forces.
A painstaking international investigation established that a Buk missile fired from a launcher that was trucked into Ukrainian rebel-held territory from a Russian military base and then driven back to Russia caused flight MH17 to explode and crash.
Investigators say it came from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, a unit of the Russian armed forces based in the Russian city of Kursk.
During the trial, prosecutors led judges through thousands of pages of evidence to support their case, including pieces of metal recovered from the bodies of victims, tapped phone conversations and extensive social media posts and other open-source data to track the movements of the Buk system before and after MH17 was destroyed.
They have demanded life sentences for all four suspects, the highest possible punishment under Dutch law.
Moscow and defense lawyers for one of the suspects have repeatedly cast doubt on the findings and steadfastly denied any involvement in the downing of MH17.
The trial is culminating amid geopolitical shockwaves from Russia's nearly nine-month invasion of Ukraine. In late September, Moscow illegally annexed parts of eastern Ukraine, including where the wreckage of MH17 landed in 2014.
Some families of the people who died anticipated Thursday’s scheduled verdict for...
