The man who faces the judges of the Dutch court responsible for prosecuting the alleged perpetrators of the MH17 crash on Monday, September 6, still wears a ring from his daughter. It identified the body of Elsemiek de Borst, lying in the plane wreckage among the sunflowers of eastern Ukraine. When on August 8, 2014, his father recognized the body, “It was intact and I was in pieces”, he said. The young woman would be 24 years old today. Corn ” for [lui], she will always be 17 ”.
Ninety relatives of the 298 victims of the Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur flight testify until September 24 before this court, which sits next to Schiphol airport. Among the passengers, the vast majority were Dutch nationals, others were of Filipino, Australian, Indonesian or British nationality. Eighty children were on board.
The MH17 was brought down by missile fire on July 17, 2014, over Donbass, in eastern Ukraine where the war pits the army loyal in Kiev against pro-Russian separatists. The prosecution accuses three former Russian military intelligence officers (GRU), Oleg Poulatov, Igor Guirkin and Sergei Dubinsky, and the pro-Russian Ukrainian, Leonid Khartchenko. The latter three have been tried in absentia since March 2020. Also absent, Oleg Poulatov is nevertheless represented by lawyers.
“I think they did this by mistake”, says Elsemiek’s father. He wants to believe that, hearing his sadness, some will come forward to raise the gray areas of the affair; then, as for himself, he adds: “They don’t care, I guess. “
It is a copious file, he says again: 65,000 pages “Who speak of a Buk missile, of geopolitics”. Fathers, brothers, mothers, sons, sisters, relatives, have placed their pain, their anger and their fears on the judges’ desk. In this crash, their intimate history mingled with history with a great H. Martine de Schutter “Has become a chapter in a history book”, thus testifies his sister, heard on September 21. The victims died in a country that many of them “Could never have pointed to a map”, also assures the brother of Tallander Niewold, another passenger who died in the crash.
Corpses that “fall from the sky”
According to the investigation, a Soviet-type Buk missile was fired at the aircraft. While advancing to the court desk, the relatives of the victims question: ” Why ? Who gave the order? “ White hair, black dress, Ria van der Steen comes to invoke the memory of her father. She quotes The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “They know they’re lying, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying. “
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