Press Briefing After Hearings in MH17 Crash Case - Video

Earlier in the day, hearings in the case resumed at the Dutch Schiphol Judicial Complex near Amsterdam. Russian nationals Oleg Pulatov, Igor Girkin, and Sergei Dubinsky, as well as Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, are the defendants.

A live broadcast shows the press briefing after the hearings in the 2014 MH17 crash case at the Schiphol Judicial Complex (JCS) in the Netherlands.

Four suspects are facing trial over their alleged responsibility for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. 

"There were 29 steel shards found in the crew's bodies. One of them was shaped like a butterfly. A forensic pathologist found it in the body of the crew's captain", Dutch prosecutor Thijs Berger said.

Another butterfly-shaped shrapnel fragment was found in the plane's cockpit. These were the only two shrapnel pieces among 370 shards recovered from the scene that still had this distinctive shape. 

Berger said that the Netherlands Forensic Institute compared the missile fragments to those collected after exploding Buk missiles in Ukraine and the Netherlands and found that "there were more similarities to a Buk of the 9М38М1 type than of the 9М38 type".

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashed on 17 July 2014 in eastern Ukraine while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. Most of the deceased were Dutch citizens. The incident is being investigated by Dutch prosecutors and the Netherlands-led Joint Investigation Team, which claim that the plane was hit by a Russian Buk missile. Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in the incident.

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