Three men charged with murder over downing of MH17

A Dutch court has sentenced three men to life in prison over the shooting down of flight MH17 in Ukraine in 2014.

Two Russian men and a Ukrainian man were convicted of murder after a court in the Netherlands found they helped procure the surface-to-air missile launcher that was used to shoot the plane out of the sky, killing 298 people including 38 Australians.

The Boeing 777 was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was hit by a missile over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, leaving the plane’s wreckage and passengers’ remains scattered across fields of sunflowers and corn.

The court found that the plane was shot down by a Russian-made missile supplied from Russia and fired by an armed group under Russian control, according to the BBC.

Four men were tried in absentia, with Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Leonid Kharchenko found guilty of murder, while a third Russian man, Oleg Pulatov, who was the only one of the four with legal representation, was acquitted.

Girkin, Dubinsky and Kharchenko, all of whom were former Russian intelligence agents, are still at large and believed to be in Russia, according to Reuters.

Judges ruled that the three men’s actions were deliberate in bringing down the plane, even though they had intended to shoot down a military aircraft, not a civilian one.

Though the men didn’t physically pull the trigger, all three were found to have helped arrange the transport of the missile.

“The families of victims wanted the truth and they wanted justice to be done and those responsible to be punished and that is what happened. I am pretty satisfied,” Piet Ploeg, who heads a foundation supporting the victims and lost his brother, his brother’s wife and his nephew in the attack, told Reuters.

Matthew Horder, whose parents Howard and Susan were on board the plane, told the ABC that the court had provided the victims families with answers.

“A court at a high level confirmed that this is what happened and those people were deliberately murdered by those three defendants,” he said.

“It’s not lost on us that the three that were found guilty are unlikely to see time behind bars, but we’ve known that since the beginning.”

The airspace where the attack occurred was considered a relatively low-level conflict zone at the time, though a number of military aircraft had been shot down in the area, prompting Ukraine to close the airspace at lower altitudes up to 32,000 feet.

Flight MH17 was flying 1000 feet above the restricted airspace.

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Igor Girkin Leonid Kharchenko mh17 Sergei Dubinsky ukraine