MH17 – NO REAL ANALYSIS OF PHONE TAPES WAS DONE FOR SEVEN YEARS
On 1 November 2021, at the MH17 court session, one of the investigating judges revealed that for seven years there had been no real audio analysis of the phone tapes provided by the SBU to the international investigation team. Worse still, when an analysis was finally requested by the investigating judges, and carried out, it was only done on copies, suggesting that they do not have the original files, thus casting doubt on the authenticity of this vital “evidence” for the prosecution.
When I wrote a year and a half ago that the trial of shame had begun in the Netherlands, many thought I had been a little strong in my words. But 18 months of proceedings have only confirmed my assessment of the MH17 trial.
To list only the major problems with the MH17 trial:
1) The trial has started while the investigation is still ongoing, which is totally illogical. It is abnormal for the investigation to continue during the trial.
2) Most of the witnesses are anonymous, so it is impossible to verify that they were where they said they were that day, and whether their testimony is reliable. These people could be SBU agents, Ukrainian nationalists willing to lie to smear Russia, or tortured prisoners who were forced to say and sign anything. The defence cannot even question them other than in writing, nor can it have access to the entirety of the testimony of these witnesses (only to certain parts chosen by the prosecutor and investigating judges).
3) Prosecutors are withholding information on an industrial scale, destroying the principle of a fair fight between the two parties. This is done by systematically refusing to allow defence lawyers and victims’ families to obtain additional information, to ask more questions, to have access to all documents (for example, the defence lawyers received a completely blacked-out diagram as “evidence” as part of the statement of one of these anonymous witnesses).
4) One of the lead prosecutors was involved in a huge legal scandal in Argentina (he has left the trial since this revelation)
With all this in mind, you already have a good idea of how this trial is unfolding. In addition, the probity of the SBU, which provided most of the ‘evidence’ in the MH17 case, has been proven to be zero, thanks to the audio analysis of several phone tapes released by the Ukrainian security service, and the publication of full versions of some of the tapes, which revealed the falsifications made.
I refer readers to Bonanza Media’s documentary “MH17 – Call for justice”, which demonstrated through an audio analysis of several phone tapes published on YouTube by the SBU, by a forensic expert, Akash Rosen, that these had been tampered with.
An analysis that a Dutch prosecutor dismissed out of hand, arguing that Rosen had not analysed the originals, but versions on YouTube, and that therefore nothing could be concluded about the authenticity of the audio files, as they had been edited and the audio re-encoded to make a video. The second argument was that one of the protagonists had allegedly confirmed that he had made these statements.
Here are the arguments I put forward at the time to show that these justifications were bogus:
1) There is a difference between just cutting out bits and pieces to keep only the interesting for the public, and completely falsifying an audio file. Akash Rosen’s report clearly shows that there is not just editing to reduce the length of the file. Pieces of sentences from different conversations have been cut and pasted together to make a new “discussion”. This is called falsifying a file.
2) The second argument is that one of the protagonists, Kozitsin, would have admitted that the conversation took place during an interview. But in fact he did not. It is the journalist’s interpretation, when Kozitsin “repeats” something he said in the conversation from which the audio recording is taken. But at no point does Kozitsin admit or say that he actually said what was broadcast.
These arguments were supported by a statement from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), which said that such an expertise should be conducted on the original file and that one should have hypotheses of manipulation to check before embarking on the analysis to confirm or not. This comment and that of the prosecutor showed a total disregard for Akash Rosen, who is a renowned forensic expert in Malaysia.
However, at the court session on 1 November, I was shocked to discover that for seven years the investigative team had not done a proper audio analysis of the phone tapes used as evidence in the MH17 case. Contrary to what was stated by the JIT at a press conference, the NFI has not done any analysis to authenticate the phone tapes provided by the SBU in the MH17 case.
See the English translation of the session of 1 November 2021 :
From 4:29 onwards, one of the investigating judges is heard explaining that in seven years, no one had done a comparative voice analysis of the 14 telephone conversations attributed to Pulatov to verify that it was indeed him! The NFI justified this by saying that they did not have a suitable reference conversation to do this voice comparison. It was apparently only this year that the NFI finally compared 12 of the 14 conversations with each other (the other two were deemed too short to be relevant), and concluded that there was a good chance that it was always the same person talking on the phone. Seven years to do this basic check!
And it is at 4:32 that we get to the most shocking part. The court asked the NFI to check whether the audio files could have been edited, i.e. tampered with. We learn that the NFI said that they could not check this because the discussions are not in English or Dutch, but in Russian, and that they do not have the experts for such an analysis!
This institute, which spat in Akash Rosen’s face, admitted to the investigating judges that it was unable to carry out the audio analysis that the Malaysian expert had carried out, on the pretext that they did not speak the language! A crazy argument when one sees that Rosen does not speak Russian either, but that the analysis of the audio streams without understanding what is being said has already provided him with elements indicating a manipulation of the files (pieces of sentences cut and then put together to create a new discussion)!
Faced with this “problem”, the investigating judges asked the forensic expertise centre in Lithuania to do the analysis. But apart from the fact that the latter merely listened to the discussions to see if they were logical and to see if the background noise was consistent (i.e. a much less technically advanced analysis than Rosen’s), we also learn that their report was delivered on 22 October 2021! That is to say, for seven years, no one had actually analysed these phone tapes to check their authenticity!
And the icing on the cake, we learn at the end of the investigating judge’s tirade that the files analysed by the Lithuanian forensic centre were copies (and not the originals) with a different format (mono for one, stereo for the other, different encoding codexes) from one file to the other! But the Lithuanian expertise centre said that the fact that the codexes changed from one file to another did not hinder the analysis. Oops.
Following the logic of this statement, the fact that Rosen analysed the YouTube versions of the phone tapes is therefore not troublesome, since no matter which codex is used, the analysis remains relevant. Rosen 1 – Prosecutor 0.
Furthermore, if Rosen’s analysis was good to go in the bin because he did not have access to the originals then the report from this Lithuanian centre of expertise must end up in the same place, and not be taken into account by the prosecution as “proof” that the files appear to be authentic (authenticity just based on listening to conversations and background noise which is limited), since this violates the principles laid down by the NFI itself! Rosen 2 – Prosecutor 0.
There are questions to be asked about the level of expertise of this centre in the field of digital audio files, when we see that it says it is not able to detect whether these conversations could have been created by voice cloning (there is now software capable of cloning a voice on the basis of a sample of barely a few seconds), whereas there are methods and software based on artificial intelligence capable of detecting a cloned voice.
The questions that arise are:
1) Why did it take seven years and the start of the trial for the ‘evidence’ of Pulatov’s involvement in the MH17 crash (the phone tapes) to be finally analysed and authenticated? Isn’t it worrying to see a man being accused and dragged before a court without the evidence of his link to the crime being seriously established and verified?
2) Why did this forensic centre not receive the original files of the phone tapes to carry out its analysis when this is an important point to be sure of the authenticity according to the Dutch prosecutor who spoke in 2020?
3) Why were the files encoded with different codexes?
If the prosecutor’s office or the investigating judges had decided not to provide the originals for security reasons and had made a copy of the 14 conversations in a specific format, the encoding following this mass processing should be the same for all files. However, this is not what we see.
The nagging impression from the investigating judge’s statement is that her team provided the Lithuanian forensic centre with what they had, i.e. copies provided by the SBU and not the original files!
If, as I suspect, the SBU provided re-encoded copies of the audio files in another format (not the originals) to the investigation team in a staggered manner, this would explain how different codexes could be used. It only takes that at time T, it is SBU agent A who produces a copy of a certain number of conversations, then at time T+N, it is agent B who produces a new batch of copies, then at time T+X, it is agent C who provides the last files, and that each one has its preferred audio file format, or different codexes depending on the computers, and you already have three different codexes in the final batch of files!
I think it would be good if the lawyers for Pulatov were to ask the investigating judges for clarification whether they have the original recordings, and if so, why they have only provided copies to the experts charged with analysing them. They should also demand access to the original files of these phone tapes so that they can conduct their counter-expertise with real audio experts. Because a sinister farce cannot be allowed to serve as a court in a case as serious as that of MH17.
Christelle Néant
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