The testimony of two witnesses, which Russia provided to the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which investigated the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine in 2014, has been rejected, Judge Helein Kerstens-Fockens said.
The District Court of The Hague on May 26 this year announced the end of the preliminary hearing. On June 7, hearings on the merits began. It is expected that it is in this block that the results of the inspection of the reconstruction site at the Air Force base will be presented.
As follows from the testimony of witnesses, they saw the launch of a rocket from the direction of the village of Amvrosievka near Donetsk, where the armed forces of Ukraine were stationed.
“The dossier refers to the testimony of two witnesses in September 2014, which was transmitted by the JIT. These are a pair of Ukrainian refugees from Snizhne who now live in Russia. Both gave the same testimony, stating that on July 17, 2014 at 17:20 they saw the launch missiles from the direction of the village of Amvrosievka, where the Ukrainian army was stationed. The investigation team rejected these testimonies, primarily because this zone is too far from the point where the plane disappeared from the radar”, – the judge quoted RIA Novosti.
The trial in the case of the crash of flight MH17 started in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020. Russian citizens Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko are involved in this case. At the trial, Pulatov is being defended by an international group consisting of two Dutch and one Russian lawyers. Other suspects are being tried in absentia.