KYIV. June 19 (Interfax) - The suspicions put forward by Dutch prosecutors against four individuals in connection with the MH17 flight crash, are based, among other things, on phone conversations intercepted by the Ukrainian side, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said.
"In this case, Ukrainian law enforcers questioned 259 people and analyzed 5.5 billion pages of all kinds of IT information, of which around 700 million pages are useful for our investigation. The whole mass of our titanic work, we then pass it on to the Joint Investigation Team, our Dutch colleagues, as per the agreement," Lutsenko told journalists in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on Wednesday.
Ukrainian investigators also have amassed a body of evidence from intercepted phone calls. The recordings obtained by the National Security Service were important for convicting the suspects, he said.
"Today's suspicion by the Dutch prosecution authority is based on said telephone interceptions among other things. So, this suspicion in Holland is yet another certificate of quality for the Ukrainian suspicion, including on the basis of the intercepted phone calls," Lutsenko said.
It was reported that on July 17, 2015 then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin signed an agreement extending the JIT's mandate to investigate the crash, thereby supporting a relevant proposal from his Dutch counterpart Fred Westerbeke.