Judge casts doubt on MH17 trial

MONDAY marked the ninth year since MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, but doubts over the real culprits behind the crime have surfaced again.

Questions are being asked after a judge distributed a book purporting to identify who was responsible for downing the plane to her colleagues at The Hague’s Court of Appeal.

Judge Charlotte van Rijnberk, who has since been reprimanded and transferred to the Tax Law office, had labelled a court’s decision to convict two Russians and a Ukrainian on Nov 22 last year as “a deliberate and transparent cover up”.

The book was written by the judge’s brother under a pseudonym. It claims that the tragedy was a false flag terror attack and blames Ukraine. The back cover of the books states that the “wrong people are on trial” and that an investigation used in the trial is “a cover up created by tunnel vision or corruption”.

In November 2022, the court found Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko guilty of murdering 298 people on board the Boeing-200ER. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. A fourth accused, Russian Oleg Pulatov was acquitted.

Seeking clues: The Malaysian MH17 investigation team hard at work at one of the crash sites near Grabovo, Ukraine.

Girkin, Dubinskiy and Kharchenko were found guilty of “unlawfully causing the plane to crash” by bringing in, transporting and deploying a Russian Buk missile which was said to have been used to shoot down MH17, which was enroute to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport from Amsterdam.

Dutch passengers made up the majority – 193 – of those who perished, followed by 44 Malaysians, including 15 crew members, while the rest of the people on board were from Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Zealand.

Last Tuesday, the Dutch Supreme Court accused Judge van Rijnberk of “unmistakably intending to influence the judicial officials involved and the course of the court case”.

The Supreme Court gave the judge, who has never been disciplined in her career before, a written warning for “undermining confidence in the authority and impartiality of the judiciary”.

It stated that van Rijnberk had directly approached judges and prosecutors who were charged with handling the case, and had also handed over the book to the leader of the Dutch team probing the crash and the country’s Attorney General.

The judge had also told them she had joined “the alternative outlined in the book and opposes the scenario presented in the court case”, describing the case as “a big show trial”.

That description is not new, though.

The Lie That Shot Down MH17, a book authored by veteran Australian journalist John Helmer with Dutch blogger Max van der Werff, film editor Liane Theuerkauf and US businessman Sam Bullard, drew attention to it, soon after the trial started on March 9, 2020.

The first published investigation into the plane tragedy, the book postulates that the Dutch government was running a farcical trial “with judges, prosecutors, lawyers and police serving as soldiers in Ukraine’s and Nato’s [the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] war against Russia.”

The 642-page book, with 758 references, maps and illustrations, highlights that the evidence extracted from 36,000 pages and presented by the prosecution in the trial fails to meet two standards in criminal law which apply everywhere, including in the Netherlands.

“These are the chain of custody which protects evidence presented in court from tampering, forgery and manipulation, and the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt.

“In law in the Netherlands, if not in the practice of the MH17 case, persons accused of the crime of murder are not obliged to prove their innocence. It is up to the prosecutors to prove their guilt. But this is not what the Dutch have done and are still [not] doing in this case.”

The book notes that such a trial would be too unlawful to be staged in a British or American court.

According to Ray McGovern, a former military intelligence officer and CIA analyst, MH17 was shot down five months after a US-backed coup in Kiev and the ensuing offensive against “pro-Russian separatists” in eastern Ukraine who were unwilling to bow to the new regime.

In a posting after the sentencing of the trio, he said pro-Russian separatists were quickly and widely blamed, but the evidence was “elusive” and its reliability “suspect from the start”.

He noted that a day after the airplane was shot down, The New York Times pointed its finger at the separatists and, by extension, Russia, unabashedly using “intelligence” provided by the SBU, Ukraine’s intelligence agency.

Two days later, then US Secretary of State John Kerry told broadcaster NBC: “We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

But why did the United States, after asserting that it had information implicating the separatists and Russia, fail to make the data public or even share it with Dutch investigators?

As McGovern noted, scepticism over Kerry’s claims grew when he was not able to twist enough arms to obtain an Intelligence Assessment, the standard for reporting on such key events. He had to settle for an entirely new creation called a “Government Assessment” to support his claims.

If it existed, why not just declassify the satellite imagery and make it available as solid evidence?“With highly sophisticated data collection capabilities for earth as well as space focused on that particular area at the time, it is, in my view, virtually certain that the US knows chapter and verse.

“If honest intelligence did support Kerry and his blaming of the Russians, I can conceive no reason why it would not be made releasable – and released – at least to the Netherlands, a Nato ally running the investigation,” added McGovern.

Even the exact place where the missile was fired from remains a mystery to investigators. The Dutch Safety Board’s final report could only place it within a 320sq km area in eastern Ukraine – covering territory then controlled by both Ukrainian and separatist forces.

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan likes this quote from author Stephen King: ‘The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.’