3 Russians sentenced to life imprisonment for shooting down Malaysian flight that killed 298
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New Delhi: Eight years after Malaysia Airlines passenger jet crashed in Ukraine, a Dutch court found three men guilty of shooting it down, killing 298 passengers on board.
Flight MH17 was hit by a Russian surface-to-air missile hours after the plane left Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014.
The District Court in The Hague sentenced three men to life imprisonment for their role in the cruel act.
Former Russian intelligence agents Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Ukrainian separatist leader Leonid Kharchenko are found guilty of the murder of innocent passengers from 17 countries.
The court, however, acquitted a third Russian national, Oleg Pulatov.
The flipside of the sentence is that all three men are believed to be in Russia, which gives them immunity.
It is highly unlikely for Russia to extradite them to face the law.
The court also ordered the convicted to pay at least 16 million euros as compensation to the relatives of the victims.
The court called the shooting down of the plane a deliberate action, all though they intended to bring down a military not a civilian aircraft, according to BBC.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy termed the judgment an important decision of the court in The Hague, adding that those who ordered the attack must face the trial.
Russia called the guilty judgment against its citizens a "scandalous" decision, while denying the responsibility for the incident.
An international probe found the Malaysia flight breaking up in midair after a missile exploded just above the left of the cockpit.
Everyone onboard was killed including 80 children; the victims included 198 Dutch nationals, 43 Malaysians, 38 Australians and 10 British national as well as 41-year-old Indian origin man as part of the fight crew.
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