Here's security service has produced what it claims is an

interceptive recording of phone calls between Russian military

intelligence officers and rebels.

I'm going to keep a word word. intelligence officers and rebels. The men can be heard talking about how they've shot down an aircraft and then realizing

it's a civilian plane. They confirm that there are no

weapons on board and that women and children have been killed. I'm in it Higgins and this is the Bellingat podcast season 1

MH17 episode 5 The Men on the Ground.

If you think about this series as being like a police investigation, we're pretty far along the evidence chain by now.

In episode one, we looked at the what?

We inspected the crime scene in the immediate aftermath of the disintegration of flight MH17.

In episode 2, we established the How, the Russian booked missile that served as the murder weapon.

We also dismantled the Russian lies

that were trying to divert us. In episode 3 we found the where.

Bellingat investigators joining endless data points from social media until we had irrefutably placed a single

book missile launcher in one field in eastern Ukraine at the exact moment MH17 was shot down.

In our previous episode we turned our attention to the who.

We focused in on three intercepted phone calls released by the Air Crash Investigators. We told you how Bellingat's

investigators match the voices of these men to a serving Russian general, to the

head of rebel intelligence in the Denis'Nass region and to a senior active Russian intelligence officer.

But these men didn't work alone. There were people above and below them in a chain of command that stretched from Moscow to Denisk.

The more links on the chain that we can identify, the closer we'll get to answering the crucial question.

Why did this happen?

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