On 17 November, the Hague District Court handed down its verdict in the case of MH17, the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing 298 people. Colonel Johan Gallant and Lieutenant Colonel Frederik Coghe of the Department of Weapon Systems and Ballistics at the Royal Military Academy were appointed as experts in the case by the court in The Hague in March 2015. Later, senior captain Elie Truyen, former assistant of the department, was also appointed as an expert.
Their task was to provide evidence that the plane was downed by a Buk missile and to determine the firing location of that missile. To this end, they worked closely with the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), composed of police and judiciary from the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Ukraine, and Belgium. The RMA experts mainly worked at three sites.
At the Dutch airbase in Gilze-Rijen, they helped with the triage of the aircraft wreckage, finding several parts of a Buk missile including a metal part in a frame of an aircraft window and part of the missile's exhaust.
In Malyn, Ukraine, they helped dismantle some Buk missiles and then conducted arena tests on them in Pavlovgrad, Ukraine. An arena test is used to collect information on the fragmentation of an explosive charge. Such a fragmentation is characteristic of any type of warhead and can thus be considered a fingerprint of a missile. The test is performed by setting up witness plates made of the same material as the fuselage of the aircraft around a missile and then detonating the warhead inside the missile. With this test, the velocity and impact density of the shrapnel can be determined. These results were subsequently compared with the damage on the aircraft wreckage, allowing the attitude and position of the Buk missile at the time of detonation to be calculated. RMA experts were in charge of these tests in Ukrainian and were supported by the technical staff of the RMA ballistics lab.
Finally, based on the attitude and position of the missile, simulations for determining the firing location were carried out in the RMA itself.