(ANSA) - THE HAGUE, AUGUST 15 - The Dutch judges will issue their verdict on November 17 in the trial of four men accused of shooting down MalaysiaAirlines flight MH17 over the skies of Ukraine in 2014: a court announced today.
"November 17, 2022 has been chosen as the provisional date for the sentence in the MH17 criminal trial," the Hague District Court said in a statement, adding that the decision "will take part of the day and will likely take place in the afternoon."
On 17 July 2014, the Boeing 777 on flight MH17 connecting Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 298 people on board, mostly Dutch tourists, was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile over the skies of Ukraine, in the border area with the territories of the self-proclaimed pro-Russian republics of Donbass.
The international experts who inspected the site and the wreck concluded that the missile boat departed from a Russian military base: a circumstance that Moscow and the pro-Russian fighting in Ukraine have always denied.
The defendants, accused of having launched the ground-to-air missile, are four officers of the pro-Russian forces of Donbass: the Russian citizens Igor Girkin, Serghei Dubinski and OlegPulatov and the Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.
(HANDLE).
