OREANDA-NEWS. The Joint Investigative Group (JIT) in the case of the death of the Malaysian Boeing MH17 shot down over the Donbass sent letters to the residents of Kursk asking them to share any information they have about who took part in the destruction of the liner. JIT also asked eyewitnesses to provide any relevant photos or video materials that can expand the understanding of exactly how the tragedy occurred, Bulgarian investigative journalist Hristo Grozev said in his Twitter microblog on Thursday, September 2.

According to the international investigation team, it was from Kursk that the Buk air defense system was sent, from which MH17 was shot down in 2014. A passenger Boeing flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17, 2014 in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. As a result of the disaster, all 298 people on board — citizens of ten countries — were killed.

A Joint investigative group was created for the criminal investigation. It included representatives of Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Russia did not enter it, because from the very beginning there were suspicions that Russian army units were involved in the destruction of the liner.

In June 2019, it was announced that the JIT had identified four suspects involved in the tragedy — a former defense minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and a retired FSB colonel Igor Strelkov-Girkin, his deputy, commander of the intelligence group and Major General Sergei Dubinsky with the call sign «Gloomy», his deputy Colonel Oleg Pulatov, as well as a field commander and a citizen of Ukraine Leonid Kharchenko.

In mid-November 2019, the JIT published telephone intercepts, from which it follows that Russia fully controlled the process of invasion of the territory of Ukraine by pro-Russian armed groups fighting under the flags of the DPR and LPR, and weapons were transported to the separatists through the channels of the FSB and GRU. Moscow has always denied any involvement in the death of MH17.