The MH17 flight went missing in 2014 and it has now been revealed it was shot down by a Russian missile (Picture: Reuters)
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down in 2014 by a Russian-made missile fired from a field in eastern Ukraine, a court has heard.
Three men have been found guilty of killing 298 people on board the flight.
Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, were found guilty of 298 counts of murder and ‘unlawfully causing an airplane to crash’ by the Hague District Court at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam.
Fourth defendant Oleg Pulatov was acquitted after the court found he had no prior knowledge of the plan to fire the missile.
Nor did he have the authority to overrule Dubinskiy’s order to find the missile, the court stated.
MH17 was a plane owned by Malaysia Airlines heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014.
Photographs from the site of the crash show scattered pieces of broken fuselage and engine parts, bodies, and passports, all of which were spread over a 50 square km radius.
Investigators confirmed that the missiles launched at the plane originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade, based in the western Russian city of Kurs
As the flight flew over the Russia-Ukraine border, it lost contact, and it’s thought that it went down over the Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine.
The Dutch Safety Board later concluded that it had been hit by a Buk missile, and broken apart in the air.
All 283 passengers and 15 crew on board were killed in the crash.
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The flight was brought down back in 2014.
