Securing important pieces of wreckage went on till 22 November. The investigators knew they would go back at a later stage, but for now they had enough. The parts they had now managed to salvage would be transported to the Netherlands, where they would undergo further examination and experts would try to piece the different parts of the plane together.
Two weeks later, on 9 December 2014, the first two convoys set out from Kharkiv to take the aircraft parts back to the Netherlands. Later there would be two more such convoys. Each convoy consisted of four orange-coloured trucks carrying parts of the wreckage, with each of these parts carefully wrapped in orange tarpaulin. In total, sixteen trucks had been assigned to transport the parts to the Dutch military helicopter base at Gilze-Rijen. On arrival, all the salvaged components were to be assembled in a specially safeguarded hangar.
After six long nights driving across Europe, from Ukraine to the Netherlands, the first two convoys, consisting of eight orange flatbed trucks, finally trundled into the air base under military escort. For the silent huddle of families who had come together for the arrival, it was a solemn, almost eerie sight, and it evoked memories of the repatriation of the dead weeks before. However, at Gilze-Rijen there was no ceremony to mark the arrival of the convoys, no royals or politicians, just the cluster of hushed relatives waiting to see, for the first time, what was left of the aircraft in which their loved ones died.
A sealed aircraft hangar had been prepared at Gilze-Rijen. There the components, in accordance with a fixed procedure, would be unloaded, photographed, scanned and categorised, down to the last nut and bolt. Experts would then start the extremely difficult and complex task of piecing together the components of the aircraft on a specially constructed frame. The whole reconstruction would take months to complete and a final report on the cause of the crash wasn’t expected until mid-2015.
Angry and disappointed because it had taken such a long time for the investigators to reach the crash site in Ukraine, those left behind began to openly complain about a lack of urgency. Not a suspect had yet been identified and, with the prospect that a final report would once again take months to come about, most of them were losing their patience. A group of relatives called for a UN envoy to take over the investigation, claiming Dutch authorities had failed in some respects.
But it was never the DSB’s task to identify the perpetrators—that was the responsibility of the Joint Investigation Team. The JIT was to find the offenders and bring them to justice. This meant there were in fact two investigations, operating under different legal frameworks and with two different purposes.
The JIT was created on 7 August 2014 after public prosecutors and investigators from the countries that were involved in the investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 first met at Eurojust in The Hague in late July to discuss their judicial strategy. An EU agency dealing with criminal judicial cooperation, Eurojust had been formed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the USA. With the focus on the fight against terrorism moving from the regional/national sphere and becoming an international affair, the 9/11 attack had served as a catalyst for the formalisation of Eurojust. Twenty-seven European countries belong to this organisation and their collaboration made it easier and more possible to exchange judicial information and personal data between the countries.
Authorities from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine signed an agreement to set up the JIT with the purpose of investigating the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, with the participation of Malaysia and Eurojust.
The purpose of the criminal investigation was to establish the facts, to identify those responsible for the crash and to collect evidence which could be used in court. The criminal investigation would focus on truth finding and its ultimate goal was, and still is, tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators. Finding facts that would hold up in court was very important because the JIT would never be able to bring any person to justice if their accusations were based merely on probability. Their conclusions would have to be substantiated by legally admissible and convincing evidence. That set the bar high.
Even though, from early on in the investigation, the most likely cause of the crash appeared to be a surface-to-air missile, nonetheless the JIT investigated other possibilities. It was important for them to keep an open, unprejudiced mind and not to be blinded by what appeared to be the most probable and logical cause. If anyone was eventually brought before a court for the MH17 disaster, their lawyers might present those other options as alternative possibilities, so the JIT had to be able to prove they had solid grounds for ruling them out. Together with the DSB, the JIT dismissed two scenarios quickly. This concerned the possibility of an accident caused by technical or human failure, and the possibility of a terrorist attack from inside the aircraft. There were no facts that could substantiate either options.
Was Flight MH17 shot down by another aeroplane equipped with a weapon system, as the Russians claimed? Radar data provided by the Russian Federation showed no clear radar images of another plane flying nearby that would support that theory: there was no other aircraft flying close enough to Flight MH17 that could have shot it down. Even the Russian Federation changed their opinion and concluded that there was no second aeroplane that could have shot down MH17.
There was an immense accumulation of evidence that Flight MH17 was definitely shot down by a ground-based air defence system. There was, however, some evidence that could undermine this conclusion. Some of the upper wreckage parts—the roof and the top of the wings—contained holes. A Buk would have targeted the plane from below, so how could there be such holes in these structures?
Taking all this into consideration, the JIT would now occupy itself with finding out the make and manufacturer of the weapon, and the location from which it had been fired. Of course, at the end of the day it would always be up to a court to make the final judgment.
The question the bereaved kept asking was how long it would take to conclude the criminal investigation. But the answer was that nobody really knew. It depended on further developments and the witnesses that might one day come forth with crucial evidence. The JIT could only make one promise to the families: whatever happened, the investigation would continue unabated until those responsible had been brought to justice.
When a Pan Am plane was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, it took three years to finish the investigation and another seven for the trial. In contrast to MH17, that incident didn’t take place over a region wrecked by war, a fact that was considerably complicating the current probe.
Chapter 21
2015
At the beginning of March 2015, the mangled wreckage of the MH17 had made its way from the wheat and sunflower fields of eastern Ukraine to a hangar at an air base in the Netherlands. The DSB believed it was time to reveal the damaged and charred pieces to the next of kin.
During the first week of March 2015, approximately five hundred relatives from around the world were taken to the three hangars where the wreckage was located: the hangar where the investigation was taking place and the two shelters where the remaining pieces were being sorted through. That cold and clinical collection of meticulously labelled aluminium plane parts—wings, wheels, pieces of fuselage and overhead luggage bins—was an eerie, for some a slightly macabre, sight. Spread out in that immaculate hangar, it brought home to all those who stood there that these bits and pieces were in fact the gathered remains of a crime scene. The last thing the victims saw was the inside of the plane.