Dutch court rejected lawyers’ demands to include evidence about Buk in MH17

The court in the Netherlands, where the trial of the crash of the Malaysian Boeing over Donbas in 2014 is underway, rejected the demand of the lawyers of Oleg Pulatov, who is one of the accused, to include in the materials the testimony of a witness claiming that the plane could not have been shot down by the Buk air defense missile system. The decision was announced on Monday at a hearing by Judge Hendrik Steinheis, TASS reports.

We will remind, the trial on the case of the crash of flight MH17 began in The Hague on March 9, 2020. Four defendants pass along it – Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko. Pulatov is represented at the trial by an international group consisting of two Dutch and one Russian lawyers. The rest of the suspects are being tried in absentia. On June 8, 2021, the consideration of the case began on the merits, today and in the next two days it reads the indictment, writes Znak.com.

According to Steinhuis, the court did not find sufficient grounds to “disbelieve the prosecutor’s office and consider that the prosecution deliberately did not include exculpatory information in the dossier.” With this in mind, the demands of Pulatov’s lawyers were rejected.

This claim was submitted by Pulatov’s lawyers on December 8. As the lawyer Sabine ten Dusschat said at the time, we are talking about a witness who served in the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation, who was near the crash site of Boeing and who, in an interview with representatives of the Joint Investigation Group (JIT), explained why the plane could not be shot down SAM “Buk”. The prosecutor’s office, she stressed, decided not to include some of his testimony in the dossier as irrelevant, however, in the opinion of the defense, such information is extremely important and should be taken into account.

A Malaysian Boeing flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014 near the village of Grabovo, Donetsk region of Ukraine, in the zone of armed conflict between the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR and the Ukrainian military. There were 298 people on board, all of whom died.