‘Air traffic controller Carlos’ who lies about flight MH17 gets money from Russia

“Spanish air traffic controller Carlos,” who allegedly worked at Boryspil Airport and reported on Twitter that Ukrainian fighter jets flew close to Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, has said that he received $48,000 from Russia, the 112 Ukraine television channel has reported.

A statement posted on the television channel’s website on March 14, with reference to an investigation conducted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the RISE Project, a Romanian investigative-journalism group based in Bucharest, the author of a tweet about the downing of the plane and the hero of a story on the RT channel is Spanish citizen Jose Carlos Barrios Sanchez.

He was detained at the airport in Bucharest in 2013 for duping eight Romanian citizens into handing over between 70 and 130 euros each under the pretext of gaining employment with an airline.

It turned out that before that he was placed on the wanted list in Spain and then he was suspected of forgery and misappropriation of property. Serving as the chairman of an apartment cooperative association near Madrid, Sanchez appropriated thousands of euros that belonged to the association. A court in Madrid sentenced him to six months in prison, so the Romanian authorities extradited Sanchez to his homeland.

Journalists contacted Sanchez in 2017 and offered a meeting to which he did not come to. He wrote to journalists that his account on Twitter had been blocked “for security reasons” after the story with MH17, after which he deleted it. He also said that he had received “a lot of money, very large sums, from transfers that came from Russia” for his tweets. Sanchez claimed to have received a total of $48,000 from Russian sources. RT denied ever making such payments.

At the same time, Sanchez did not provide any evidence of what was said and noted that he had never been on Ukrainian territory and had not worked as an air traffic controller.

The Boeing 777 belonging to Malaysia Airlines flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) was shot down by a Russian Buk missile on July 17, 2014. All 298 passengers on board were killed. The passengers of the flight were citizens of ten countries, and most of those killed were citizens of the Netherlands.