MH17 anniversary: Meet the man suing Putin, who now fears for his life
Maxim Tucker, kiev
17 JULY 2016 • 1:31PM
When aviation lawyer Jerry Skinner stopped by his suburban Cincinnati office last Christmas, he found the door ajar and the interior trashed. The files for his latest lawsuit, on behalf of victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crash, were missing.
“They didn’t take anything else but they turned the rest of the office inside out,” he remembered. “The police couldn’t say who did it - whoever came into the office was careful.”
Thirty days earlier, the white-bearded, friendly faced lawyer had issued a threat. Weighing up all the available photographic, video and witness evidence, he decided that the missile that blew the passenger jet apart mid-air, killing all 298 people on board, must have been a Russian one. And that it had been fired from rebel-held eastern Ukraine by soldiers ultimately under the command of President Vladimir Putin.
“I wrote to the embassy of the Russian Federation and to Vladimir Putin that I intended to bring an action against them - unless they wanted to sit down and talk - and I wanted to hear from them within thirty days,” he said. “Thirty days passed and I got robbed.” Mr Skinner suspected he was being targeted by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. His computer was repeatedly hacked. Threatening voicemails accumulated on his answerphone.
So three days after the burglary, he quickly and quietly packed his remaining files and moved office in the dead of night. He changed his phone number and hid from public view as he built a case for his clients - 33 relatives of 16 Australian and Malaysian passengers who fell 33,000 feet onto the black earth of Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas region.
Only now, with his lawsuit lodged last month at the European Court of Human Rights and hearings likely to begin later this year, has he emerged to publicise the families’ claim and call for more relatives to join the case.
He hopes that public pressure, combined with a report on the findings of an international criminal investigation into MH17 due in autumn, might encourage the Kremlin to come clean.
continue reading...