On 15 July 2014, just two days before the downing of MH17, Higgins had launched the Bellingcat platform with the help of private donations. After the downing, Higgins’s band of citizen journalists began conducting their own investigation into what caused the MH17 to crash. They followed the progress of a Russian missile launcher that had been noticed in the area where the plane had come down. The Bellingcat team—which at the time was formed by an American, a Russian, a Dutchman, a Finn and its founder, Englishman Higgins—were all volunteers and were not being paid for their work. The MH17 disaster had left a trail of digital data, before and after the disaster, and the team members were experts at finding this data and piecing the puzzle together. The evidence they uncovered online and on social media seemed to point to this particular Russian missile as being involved.
Throughout their investigation, Bellingcat shared their findings with the JIT investigators from the Netherlands, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine and Australia. The JIT was very well aware of the importance that social media could have in uncovering what had happened and in the ultimate arrest of any suspects, so they took the information that Bellingcat shared with them seriously. When Russian officials blamed the flight’s destruction on Ukrainian forces and presented radar data, expert testimony and a satellite image, it was Bellingcat that exposed the photo as being a composite of Google images, with even the Malaysian airline logo being misplaced.
Now the Leicester-based investigative journalists were revealing to the world that a Russian unit had transported to Ukraine the Buk missile system that eventually brought down MH17. The unit was identified as the Second Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, coming from the area of Kursk.
The battalion consisted of about a hundred soldiers, but Bellingcat’s analysis narrowed the number of suspects involved with the MH17 down to approximately twenty soldiers. The Dutch Safety Board had concluded in October 2015 that the aircraft crashed due to the impact from a surface-to-air missile, most likely a Buk, which suggested that the type of weapon had been clearly established. Using the internet and social media, Bellingcat was able to piece together that the Russian 53rd air force brigade had Buk weaponry at their disposal. Although the journalists did not claim to know who pushed the button or who gave the order, they were pretty sure that someone serving on the 53rd brigade could reveal that information. Difficult as it would be, if any perpetrators were tracked down, finding reliable witnesses would prove much harder. It was expected that no one in that battalion would stand up voluntarily to give evidence.
There were people in Russia and in the West who thought that Bellingcat’s claims were based on flimsy and biased evidence; hardly anyone appeared to be checking if the information supplied by Bellingcat was correct. When other experts took a close look at their claims, they discovered that the flatbed truck that was supposed to be transporting the Buk took a route that led under an overpass. The flatbed with the Buk on it could never have been driven under it because the underpass was not high enough to allow clearance. There was no detour route, although it was later claimed that the Buk could have been taken off the flatbed and driven under the underpass and into a paddock on its own wheels.
A civilian journalist platform, of course, is under no obligation to be unbiased and it can offer plausible, but unproven, hypotheses. The increased public scrutiny did not deter Higgins, who remained confident about his conclusions, explaining that: ‘People who say I am biased will say that anyway. The methods we use are transparent and anyone who invests some time can validate what we do.’
In May Bellingcat unveiled new Buk footage, which had been shot from a moving car on 17 July. It was the first time that the Buk was clearly visible on top of the flatbed.
Russia rejected Bellingcat’s report. In a separate probe into the crash, Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey said the missile had exploded near the left side of the aircraft. Almaz-Antey considered this to be proof that the projectile could only be a missile from a Buk system launched from the region of Zaroshchenske, controlled by the Kiev forces at the time of the incident.
In March 2016 the Dutch-led JIT stated that they would soon be able to determine the exact launch site of the missile that destroyed the plane. Fred Westerbeke, the prosecutor leading the international probe, warned that it would take much longer than the JIT had previously expected to complete the whole investigation. He pledged to finish the investigation ‘as quickly as possible, if only because of the frustration among the families’, but declined to offer a possible date. Two years after the disaster, the survivors were still facing much uncertainty and frustration.
There were still two Dutch victims who had not been identified; one of them was sixteen-year-old Gary Slok, who had left for a holiday in Borneo with his mother. His father, Jan Slok, was slowly losing hope that any remains of his son would ever be found. His ex-wife, Petra van Langeveld, had been identified months ago. Every time fragments or remains were found at the crash site, Jan Slok had hoped some part of these remains would be confirmed as being Gary’s. But after two years the boy still had not been found.
As time passed it became ever harder for Jan to accept that his son would probably never come home. ‘I even asked them [the family counsellors] to lie to me and tell me that he had been identified. Just for the sake of my own peace of mind.’ Jan did receive Gary’s backpack with his things inside and, in the absence of any physical remains, Jan and his wife, Louise, symbolically buried that backpack in a coffin next to his mother’s.
The downing of MH17 was becoming such a complex issue that now even the truth was becoming difficult to recognise. With all the different versions and stories, the obvious question arose as to who to believe or who not to believe.
Nineteen months after the crash, the next of kin were becoming exceedingly impatient with the drawn-out process of investigation. It was taking way too long. Eighteen families combined forces and sent a letter to Russia, Ukraine and the United States, asking them to disclose any satellite or radar images connected to the downing of MH17. The Russians were quick to engage with the families, who asked Putin if he could find out if there were backups of the imagery; they wanted to know if Russia possessed footage of the actual downing.
Deputy chief of Russia’s Air Transport Agency Oleg Storchevoi informed the families that Russia had already offered their imagery to the Dutch Safety Board in August 2014, right after the crash. Russia still had the images and was willing to offer them to the DSB or any other organisation responsible for investigating the MH17 tragedy. But the DSB claimed that Russia had only sent video footage of the radar screen combined with the footage from the primary and secondary surveillance radars. Storchevoi answered that: ‘The Russian primary [a radar system that is situated on the ground and traces the skies for any movement] radar footage is only kept on video format which is not against any international civilian air force rule.’ He went on to say that this data ‘was ignored by the DSB in its work and was not even mentioned in their report on the results of the investigation’.
It took Ukraine six months to respond to the letter requesting radar recordings. Only after Dutch prime minister Rutte demanded a response from Poroshenko did Ukraine feel compelled to reply. To the astonishment of the families, Ukraine let them know that there was no radar imagery for 17 July—Ukraine radars had all been offline that day due to maintenance.
Ukraine had three radar systems and apparently on 17 July 2014 all three had been turned off. One of them had been badly damaged during the hostilities in 2014, but Ukrainian officials claimed the others had been switched off because no military flights had been planned for 17 July. It was a dubious explanation. The country was at war, so it would be very unlikely for it to turn off all its radar systems. Just before 17 July, many military flights had been operating and eyewitnesses told journalists that they had seen a number of military aircraft flying over the area where the plane was brought down on 17 July.