Prosecutor Ridderbecks Demands Life Imprisonment For Four Defendants In MH17 Case
Photo: Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters
Life sentence is the only appropriate punishment for those accused in the crash of the Malaysian Boeing 777 over Donbas in 2014. Prosecutor Manon Ridderbeks stated this at a hearing in the Netherlands, TASS reports her words.
“We demand that each of the four accused be sentenced to life imprisonment,” Ridderbecks said. According to the newspaper, the prosecutor's office found the former defense minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) Igor Girkin (better known as Strelkov) and his subordinates Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko guilty of the crash of flight MH17.
The prosecutor also demanded that the court issue an arrest warrant for suspects if found guilty. She noted that the accused Russians live in the Russian Federation, which does not extradite its citizens, and the location of Kharchenko is unknown. “However, this does not mean that they will remain unpunished forever. Laws and treaties provide the accused with the opportunity to serve the sentence imposed by the Dutch court abroad, ”concluded Ridderbecks.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the process in the Dutch court in the case of the MH17 disaster over the Donbas is teeming with double standards. In particular, he noted that Kiev is not required to disclose data from radars and provide records of dispatchers' conversations from the liner, and the United States is not required to show satellite images that they allegedly have.
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk region on July 17, 2014. There were 298 people on board, all of whom died.
