On Wednesday, a group of investigators from the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), a set of investigative agencies of the member countries of the European Union, he said that there are “strong” indications of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s involvement in the shooting down of flight MH17, which on 17 July 2014 caused the death of 298 passengers and crew members. The flight was shot down by pro-Russian separatists who were fighting in the area at the time, with military support from the Russian army. According to the JIT, Russia supplied the missile at the request of pro-Russian separatists. However, there are no indications that Putin actually ordered the shooting down of the flight, which has always been considered unlikely anyway.
The JIT communicated these conclusions also announcing the end of the investigations, claiming that it no longer had the elements to continue them. However, the Russian involvement in the downing of MH17 is nothing new: from various previous investigations and from numerous journalistic reports it had already emerged that the missile launcher on which the missile was mounted had been supplied by Russia, and that after the launch it was reported in Russian territory. Just last November a court in the Netherlands convicted two Russian men and one Ukrainian for the incident.
Flight MH17 crashed near Grabovo in eastern Ukraine. The plane had departed from Amsterdam around noon and should have landed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, around midnight, after about 12 hours of flight time. On board were 283 passengers from different countries – European, Australian, Canadian, Indonesian, Malaysian, New Zealand and Filipino – and 15 crew members.
– Read also: The sentences for the shooting down of flight MH17