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DPR’s militia denies involvement in 2014 Boeing crash

Earlier, the Joint Investigation Team named three Russian and one Ukrainian nationals suspected of being involved in the crash

DONETSK, June 19. /TASS/. The forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic could not have been involved in the Boeing catastrophe in Donbass in the summer of 2014 because they did not possess any Buk missile systems, the DPR’s militia commented on the statements by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) and the Dutch prosecution on Wednesday.

"In 2014, the DPR army did not have any Buk missile systems in service, such systems are not in service today as well. Therefore, the militia could not have been involved in the Boeing crash in Donbass," the Donetsk News Agency quotes the statement. The militia added that the DPR does not have specialists trained to run these systems either.

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Investigators to request interrogation of Russian suspects in MH17 case

On Wednesday, the JIT named three Russian and one Ukrainian nationals suspected of being involved in the Boeing jet crash in Ukraine in July 2014. The list of suspects includes Igor Girkin, known under the nickname of Strelkov, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Leonid Kharchenko.

Vice-speaker of the State Duma (lower chamber) Pyotr Tolstoy expressed confidence that the JIT by making this statement about the "guilty" in this tragedy has completely discredited itself. He drew attention to the fact that it copies the Bellingcat report word by word and rests on the dubious publications in social networks. "Not a single piece of evidence or a fact. There isn’t even the most evident one, the decoded data of the flight recorders," he pointed out.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing-777 passenger plane travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down on July 17, 2014, over Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk. The crash killed all the 283 passengers, citizens of 10 countries, and 15 crewmembers. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) looking into the crash is made up of representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine. On May 24, the experts published a provisional report, claiming that the missile system that was used to down Flight MH17 could have been transferred from Russia and be a part of the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade near Kursk.

Moscow rejects the JIT accusations. Particularly, the Russian Defense Ministry said that no Russian army missile system had ever crossed the Ukrainian border. Moreover, the defense ministry’s representatives reported that they had identified the missile that was launched to down the Boeing and established that it was transferred over to the Ukrainian troops back in 1986 and had never returned to Russia since.

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