Ukraine initially confirmed that the eight crew members who died were Ukrainian citizens. “The preliminary cause of the accident is the failure of one of the engines,” said Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko.

A BIRN investigation later revealed the involvement of companies from Poland, Bosnia and Serbia in the plane’s cargo.

The crash happened five months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began. But the owner of Meridian, Denis Bogdanovich, told Reuters that the cargo had nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia.

Experts told BIRN that although Kyiv is keen to secure weapons supplies, that doesn’t mean the cargo was bound for Ukraine.

“Ukraine needs any ammunition it can get. But that does not prove at all that the ammunition on the [Antonov] plane was for Ukraine,” said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI.

A spokesman for the Bangladesh military told the BBC after the crash that the arms had been bought from Serbia to use in training army personnel and border guards.

Fifteen months after the crash, however, there are still unanswered questions about the doomed flight, while the identities of the crew members who died have not yet been made public.

Greek officials have not released any information from the crash investigation and both the Greek and Ukrainian authorities haven’t spoken publicly about the case for more than a year. Two Greek ministries did not respond at all to BIRN’s questions about the flight.

Arms deal links Serbia, Bosnia and Bangladesh

The Antonov plane that crashed in July 2022 was carrying 60mm M62 mortar training rounds, 82mm M62 mortar training rounds and 82mm M67 mortar flares produced by Serbian state-owned arms factory Krusik.

“Around 3.30 in the morning, three to four hours after the plane came down, we received a response from the civil aviation service that the plane, according to its [flight] statement, was carrying training missiles, and from what the army explosives experts told us, on that basis there is no hazard, there may be small amounts of nitroglycerin and phosphorus compounds, possibly some phosphorus compounds. These were the only dangerous things,” said Bosbotis Christos, who was president of the Kavala municipal council at the time.

The area where the plane crashed, just a few dozen metres away from people’s houses, was sealed off, and Land Mine Clearance Battalion troops worked to locate and register the munitions.

The area remained sealed off for more than four months, and in December 2022, the wreckage of the aircraft was removed.

Questions were raised immediately after the crash about the cargo’s ownership and the companies involved.

The end user of the 11.5 tonnes of ammunition on board was the Bangladeshi Defence Ministry.

The broker of the deal with Bangladesh was a Bosnian company, BA-METALEXPORT from Sarajevo, which was owned by Polish firm Metalexport-S, BIRN reported.

A Serbian private company, Valir, which was responsible for the cargo, obtained the Serbian export licence to Bangladesh in the name of the Bosnian company.

Greece reportedly complained to the Ukrainian ambassador in Athens and the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it should have been informed in advance about the aircraft’s cargo.

But Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic insisted that his country had complied with all the requirements for exporting the ammunition carried by the Ukrainian-leased transport aircraft.

BIRN sent questions to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministry but did not receive any replies by the time of publication of this article.

A Greek Civil Aviation Authority representative also did not answer questions sent by BIRN, instead stating that the independent Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board was responsible for the case.

The Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board told BIRN that the case is still under investigation and that it cannot make any comment.

Plane linked to Cypriot offshore companies

Soviet-built, Cold War-era Antonov An-12 planes are still widely used by cargo companies even though they are now ageing.

The Ukrainian company Meridian says on its website that it carries out charter cargo flights around the world, as well as fulfilling contracts with governmental and non-governmental organisations for the transportation of humanitarian goods. Meridian also says that it cooperates with the UN and NATO to deliver urgent cargo, including military and dual-use shipments.

Meridian leases three Antonov aircraft from DS Air Cyprus, whose director at the time of the accident was another Cyprus-based offshore company, Ledra Corporate Directors Limited. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Offshore Leaks Database, Ledra is connected with the company Mewnel Investments, Ltd. The Offshore Leaks Database claims that Mewnel is linked to Russia; the company’s own country of registration is not identified in the database.

One of Ledra’s directors is lawyer Christodoulos Vassiliades, who was sanctioned in April 2023 by the British Foreign Office for allegedly assisting sanctioned Russia oligarchs to hide their assets in complex financial networks. The United States also imposed sanctions on him.

After the plane crash in Greece revealed that the aircraft was carrying arms, Ledra decided to cease working with Cypriot offshore company DS Air Cyprus.

“Both we as a law firm and the company Ledra Corporate Directors Limited have had no involvement in the activities of the companies in question and have never been informed of or involved in an arms transfer agreement with the aircraft in question,” said Vassiliades, the managing director of Ledra. He added Ledra never managed Mewnel Investment, Ltd.

DS Air Cyprus then tried to find another Cypriot offshore company to work with. A Ukrainian lawyer approached the Cypriot offshore Totalpro Services Ltd. on August 8, 2022, but it rejected the proposed collaboration.

“Before agreeing to take on this potential client, we requested all the documents and information required by our due diligence procedures, and during our audit we discovered from publications that this company is connected to the plane that crashed in Kavala,” Loucas Demetriou, Totalpro’s CEO, told BIRN.

“For this reason and because we do not want customers with an increased risk, we decided to reject this potential customer,” he added.

The choice of Cyprus as the company’s base is purely for tax reasons, but Dimitris Pantelatos, a retired Greek air vice-marshal, told BIRN that in such situations, “the specific companies are used as tools, in the context of a more general design that wants to transfer weapons around the world with summary procedures, which are nebulous”.

DS Air Cyprus and its new director, Ukrainian lawyer Andrii Bondar, did not reply to BIRN’s questions. Neither did Denis Bogdanovich, the Ukrainian owner of Meridian, which leased the plane that crashed.

Bogdanovich also has a company named Meridian Avia Agro that has been providing aviation chemical services since 2015.

Official investigation still under wraps

Serbia has acknowledged that from 2011 to 2018, it exported artillery to Bangladesh. The Serbian national arms export report for 2018-19 also included information on licences for the export of unidentified artillery systems to Bangladesh, said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI.

“Overall, the Serbian arms industry is very active in seeking and maintaining arms export markets in Asia, including Bangladesh,” SIPRI told BIRN.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has also reported contacts with Bangladesh in 2021 related to the transfer of artillery. But SIPRI said it did not know if that involved an actual deal or just sending equipment for evaluation.

BIRN asked Bosnian company BA-METALEXPORT how transporting this relatively small amount of arms to Bangladesh by plane was economically worthwhile. The company’s director said it was necessary to meet the deadline agreed with Bangladesh.

“The problems with transport in the world are huge. One container sent by ship is 150,000 euros, so we could not do that. The Bangladeshi side agreed to send two shipments by plane,” director Alen Djuzel told BIRN.

Several countries that support Ukraine with arms have been relatively open about the broader outlines of such military aid. But all the countries that are providing weapons have been cautious about revealing the amounts and exact origins of such the arms and ammunition they supply, according to SIPRI.

Djuzel however denied speculation that the arms were supposed to go to Ukraine, which arose because the operator of the Antonov An-12 plane was Ukrainian cargo airline Meridian.

“A deal with Bangladesh was signed in 2021, before the war in Ukraine even began,” Djuzel said.

NATO also confirmed that it had no involvement in the arms transfer.

“The flight that crashed in Greece in 2022 was not related to NATO, nor was it on a NATO mission. For any other queries, we refer you to the Ukrainian and Greek authorities,” a NATO spokesperson told BIRN.

As to the identities of the eight crew members who died in July 2022, the Ukrainian embassy in Athens declined to provide any information about them.

“According to our information, the official investigation into the plane crash is ongoing with no legal authorisation to give out the personal data of a private cargo airline crew who tragically lost their lives. The embassy is not taking part in the aforementioned investigation,” the Ukrainian embassy said.

The Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board said it will issue a preliminary report about the probe by the end of this month.