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Dutch justice opened the process on Monday against four suspects, absent on the bench, accused of having caused the explosion in 2014 of the MH17 flight over Ukraine that killed the 298 people on board.

Judge Hendrik Steenhuis declared the initial hearing open at the Schiphol court, on the outskirts of Amsterdam and near the place where the Boeing had taken off that was hit in flight by a Soviet-made BUK missile.

The Russians Sergey Dubinski, Igor Guirkin and Oleg Pulatov, as well as the Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, four senior commanders of the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, are accused of killing and deliberately causing the plane to fall.

As neither Russia nor Ukraine extradite their citizens accused abroad, the suspects will not be present in this trial that can last up to five years. They will then be judged in default.

For the families of the victims, who have been fighting for more than five years to "do justice", it is a "very important day".

"It is the first day they will tell us what happened, who was responsible, why the plane was shot down," said Piet Ploeg, president of a Dutch victims association, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and his nephew in the catastrophe.

Malaysian Airlines' Boeing 777, which made the Ämsterdam-Kuala Lumpur link on July 17, 2014, was impacted on the area where the armed conflict between the Ukrainian forces and the pro-Russian separatists took place. The 298 people on board, including 196 Dutch, died.

The four suspects are accused by the Dutch prosecutor's office of having brought the BUK anti-aircraft missile system to Ukraine, although it has been powered by other unidentified people.

"Bias"

The international team of researchers, led by the Netherlands, established in May 2018 that the plane was shot down by a missile from the 53rd Russian anti-aircraft brigade based in Kursk (southwest).

After those revelations, Holland and Australia, which lost 38 of its citizens in the tragedy, openly accused Russia of what happened.

Russia has always vehemently denied any involvement and blame on Ukraine.

The spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Maria Zajárova, accused the Netherlands on Friday of trying to "pressure the court."

The four defendants run the risk of being sentenced to life imprisonment.

The best known of them, Igor Guirkin, was one of the main commanders of the separatists at the beginning of the conflict, and denies all involvement in the tragedy.

Investigators do not rule out new charges in the future.

In mid-November, they revealed the content of telephone conversations that showed "close ties" between Russian suspects and senior officials, including Vladislav Surkov, an influential advisor to President Vladimir Putin.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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