Eight years on from the tragic downing of a Malaysia Airlines commercial flight, here’s everything we know.
What do we know?
On 17 July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur under the flight number MH17 at an altitude of 33,000 feet.
It was one of 160 flights that crossed the airspace of eastern Ukraine that day. MH17 was shot down and crashed near the Ukrainian village of Hrabove. All 298 passengers and crew on board died.
An exclusion zone prevailed at 32,000 feet because of the conflict between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels.
Five countries – the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine – formed the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) into the tragedy.
On 24 May 2018 the JIT announced that the Buk missile installation that brought down the flight belonged to the Russian army.
The missile, which can reach a height of 80,000 feet, was fired from rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine – at a target that may mistakenly have been assumed to be a Ukrainian military aircraft.
Who was responsible?
A murder trial was held by the Hague District Court, sitting in a high-security courtroom at Schiphol Airport.
Dutch prosecutors said the missile launcher came from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, a unit of the Russian armed forces based in the Russian city of Kursk and was driven back there after MH17 was shot down.
Three men, none of whom were in court, were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The most senior was Igor Girkin, a 51-year-old former colonel in the Russian intelligence service, FSB, also known as “Strelkov”. At the time of the downing, he was defence minister and commander of the armed forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic – the region where the plane was shot down. Girkin is reportedly involved in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Also convicted were Girkin’s subordinates, a Russian named Sergey Dubinskiy, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian separatist leader.
While they may not have fired the missile, they were held responsible for it being in position.
What did the investigators find?
At a Dutch airbase, investigators pieced together fragments of the cockpit and cabin, which were ripped apart by the explosion.
The final report by the Dutch Safety Board was released in October 2015.
Circumstantial evidence and sightings on…
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