Their son had been on a seven-week trip through Europe that also included trips to Moscow and St Petersburg, but he had never made it home. Their only consolation was that Jack had sent messages about how much he was enjoying his trip. The photos he had forwarded to his sister and parents showed him standing in an eerie twilight in midsummer Iceland, running with the bulls in Pamplona and the different meals he had managed to devour along the way. Jack had been so close to coming back to his parents, but fate had chosen differently that day. And now they were placing trinkets from Jack’s family and friends in Australia—ribbons and knitted scarfs in the colours of his Winston Hills football team—on the branches of a tree more than ten thousand kilometres away in the Netherlands.
Jon and Meryn O’Brien realised that the investigative and prosecution process would probably take years to play out, but their son had lost his chance to live so the truth mattered. They had sent letters to Putin pleading with him to reveal all he knew. The relatives all felt that some responsibility must lie with Ukraine for not closing its airspace during the conflict, and with Malaysia Airlines, which had continued to fly over Ukraine.
By now most relatives realised that justice for this tragic incident was not going to be a two-year process but more like a ten-year process. The JIT would only get one chance to do this right and, in the meantime, everybody was asked to remain patient. Family members were motivated to keep the publicity pressure on, because that was what would finally make the case move forward. They would keep what happened on 17 July 2014 alive and they would keep the victims in the public eye until those who were responsible were brought to justice.
By now most of the relatives assumed that the chance of suspects actually being tried was very small. Mostly they just wanted to have the whole story set out in front of a judge. They wanted names, what happened, who was responsible, including the chain of command that had been in charge of this strategy. They of course wanted to see those responsible tried and sentenced in the Netherlands, but they also realised this was something that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Some wondered if the MH17 case would ever come to any satisfying end.
In Australia a memorial was unveiled outside Parliament House in Canberra. A large contingent of the victims’ relatives attended the ceremony along with Australia’s ambassador to the Netherlands. And earlier that day, more than ninety family members attended a memorial in Malaysia for victims and a briefing about the ongoing probe. Malaysian transport minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters after the event that the investigation was ‘very detailed and we are quite convinced that we will be able to find the culprits’. But foreign minister Julie Bishop said in a statement that those behind the shooting down of MH17 may have to be tried in absentia. Bishop promised to use every legal avenue to bring those responsible to justice.
Every year the people of Hrabove, where the plane had come down, conducted their own memorial at the site where a shrine had been erected. A number of villagers had been badly traumatised after they confronted the enormity of the body count. Bodies had fallen into their gardens and in one case a body had fallen through a kitchen roof. Many villagers were still suffering from these vivid memories, which kept them awake at night and made them anxious about any loud noises.
Near the end of 2017 Bellingcat identified one of the high-ranking military that the JIT had been searching for over quite some time. In September 2016, the Joint Investigation Team had announced the preliminary results of its MH17 investigation and asked researchers to help identify the voices of two people captured in a radio transmission about the delivery of a Buk missile to the separatists. In the conversation, intercepted and released by Ukrainian national security officials in July 2014, the men address each other only by call signs and names that could easily have been invented. One was ‘Delfin’ or ‘Dolphin’, the other ‘Orion’.
The JIT had been attempting to identify the two people behind the voices on these tapes as both were suspected of having played a significant role in the downing of MH17. Bellingcat now said it had reasonable evidence to link one voice on the tape, that of Delfin, to a Russian general. On the tapes a man’s voice can be heard talking about a convoy heading for Snizhne, the village near which people claimed to have seen a Buk launching system. After analysing the voice on the tape, Bellingcat concluded that the wanted man called ‘Delfin’ must be Colonel General Nikolaj Fjodorovitsj Tkatsjov. Bellingcat admitted that the evidence was circumstantial, but they still referred it to the JIT. They continued searching for the other voice on the tape, that of a man with the code name ‘Orion’.
In November Dutch forensic experts received more fragments of human remains found in east Ukraine. Freelance journalist Patrick Lancaster had collected twenty-three fragments and handed them over to the Ukrainian authorities, who sent them to the Netherlands to be tested. First it was assumed that the fragments had come from animals but, after testing, fifteen of the twenty-three fragments were found to have human DNA, and eight of those were traced to people who had died in the disaster.
Chapter 24
2018
At the beginning of 2018 one of the most persistent rumours about the MH17 tragedy was exposed as being a lie. Over the years, the Kremlin and its media—and occasionally some of the Western media—had put forward a number of contradictory and sometimes highly implausible alternative theories on MH17, such as:
‘MH17 was blown up by a missile intended for the Russian president’s plane.’
‘It was already full of dead bodies and deliberately crashed.’
‘It was shot down by a Buk missile, but not one of Russia’s.’
‘MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian jet.’
This last theory in particular ricocheted around Russian state media and on Twitter; according to this account, two Ukrainian fighter jets had flown close to the Boeing 777 shortly before it disappeared from the radar. But beyond this claim it had always been clear what Russia’s guiding position on the tragedy was: Ukraine was to blame. ‘The state over whose territory this occurred bears responsibility for this awful tragedy,’ Putin told a meeting of economic advisers just after the crash.
So the theory that a Ukrainian jet had been responsible for the downing was the one that Moscow persistently clung to; it even named the pilot and offered a witness. This theory, so strongly advocated by Russia, initially caused doubt in the West, especially because Ukraine had not closed its airspace even though in the days preceding the disaster there had been several air battles in the area, including the downing of a Ukrainian military cargo plane from a high altitude. When a ‘Spanish air traffic controller’, who went by the name of ‘Carlos’ and allegedly worked at Boryspil airport in Kiev, reported on Twitter that he had noticed two Ukrainian fighter jets flying close to Flight MH17 just before the crash, it had increased the degree of doubt in the West.
But after people began to investigate the identity of this mysterious ‘Carlos’, some major questions were raised. Jose Carlos Barrios Sanchez, a Spaniard by birth, claimed he had worked for several years as a traffic controller. Kiev airport stated that all their air traffic controllers were and always had been Ukrainian, and that they would never employ a Spaniard to do this kind of work at the airport.
Sanchez turned out to be a conman who was wanted in Spain for forgery and misappropriation of property. As the chairman of an apartment cooperative association near Madrid, Sanchez had pocketed thousands of euros that belonged to the association. After a court in Madrid sentenced him to six months in prison, he fled to Bucharest, where he was extradited for duping eight Romanian citizens and sent back to Spain. Carlos soon disappeared from Russia’s account as a swirl of speculation rose about the veracity of his claims.