Donetsk, Mar 12 - DAN. Donetsk People’s Republic Foreign Minister, DPR representative to the Contact Group Natalia Nikonorova has said that Dutch royal land forces commander Martin Wijnen distorted the truth about the crash of the Malaysian Boeing 777 in Donbass.
On March 3, Martin Wijnen told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf that DPR militiamen had not helped the international experts who had looked for plane fragments and victims’ remain in the crash site area.
“He might have forgotten during the interview, that Mark Rutte’s Cabinet later on acknowledged all these claims as speculations and regretted the insulting remaks towards the local residents who had put in a quality and diligent effort to gather plane crash victims’ remains and send them to the Netherlands,” Nikonorova said on Thursday. “He also forgot that immediately after the accident, the militia announced unilateral three-day ceasefire and guaranteed the safety of everybody taking part in the search.”
The DPR foreign minister expressed the opinion that the authors of the publication planned to manipulate the public opinion in the runup to the plane crash trial.
“As for Ukrainian media, the fake news published by Telegraaf, spread like fire in Ukrainian media space without any critical scrutiny. Ukrainian spin doctors intentionally forgot that that the evacuation had been repeatedly postponed due to the crash site shelling by Ukrainian artillery, and that the Dutch investigators could only access it on August 6, 2014 where they could work just for20 hours due to Ukrainian artillery strikes,” she said.
In this connection, Nikonorova urged the international community to pay attention to the inadmissibility of truth distortion attempts, and called upon the Dutch side to stop the speculations around the Malaysian Boeing tragedy.
The Boeing-777 of Malaysian Airlines flying from Amsterdam to Kuala-Lumpur crashed in the village of Grabovo near Torez on July 17, 2014. There were no survivors among the 298 people on board. The persons behind the crash remain unidentified.
A Joint Investigation Team was set up to probe the tragedy. It included representatives of Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. In June 2019, experts said that they had identified a group of four persons suspected of involvement in the accident: former DPR defense minister Igor Girkin, his subordinates Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko. They were accused of importing the Buk air defence system from Russia.
The trial began at the Schiphol judicial complex in the Netherlands on Monday. Russian officials repeatedly said that they had no confidence in the JIT team’s probe results, pointing out that the accusations were unsubstantiated and that Russia’s conclusions were rejected in the course of the investigation.*jk