Where are all the bodies? Australian air force plane and refrigerated trucks arrive in Holland to wait for MH17 victims – but Ukraine says there were only 200 recovered from the crash site
- 150 Dutch forensic experts assembled to collect DNA from close family, a similar process for 2010 Libya crash
- Rebel commanders claimed it had found 282 bodies and 87 body parts from 16 people
- However, Dutch official said only 200 bodies were on board the train
- It is also believed the cockpit was sawn in half while under the control of Russian-backed separatists
- Malaysian PM Najib Razak said rebels had handed over both black boxes
- Putin vows to strengthen military to combat NATO and 'external threats'
Grieving relatives of those killed in the MH17 plane massacre have suffered fresh anguish after it emerged as many as a third of the passengers could still be missing.
The devastating development came as international forensic experts finally boarded the train in which pro-Russian rebels had placed recovered bodies.
As the makeshift morgue arrived in the ‘safe’ Ukrainian city of Kharkiv yesterday rebel commanders claimed it contained 282 bodies and 87 body parts from 16 people.
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A Boeing C-17 of the Royal Australian Air Force at Eindhoven Airbase where it is waiting to fly the first bodies back to the Netherlands where the MH17 flight took off
A Boeing C-17 of the Australian Air Force stands at the Eindhoven Airbase in The Netherlands ahead of bringing the victims of the MH17 flight back to be repatriated
Refrigerated trucks enter the compound of the Korporaal van Oudheusdenkazerne in Hilversum where the bodies will be identified before they are repatriated
This would have accounted for all of the 298 murdered when the Boeing 777 was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile last week.
However, after carrying out a body count last night, forensic experts found the number to be ‘significantly less’ than the figure claimed by separatist leader Alexander Borodai.
The head of the Dutch team leading the investigation, Jain Tuinder, said he estimated just 200 bodies had arrived in Kharkiv as well as a number of unidentified body parts.
Mr Tuinder vowed to recover the others, saying: ‘They will be found. We have to find them.
Carriages of death: A train carrying the remains of more than 280 victims of the Malaysia Airlines MH17 disaster arrives in the Ukrainian government-held city of Kharkiv
Macabre delivery: Police officers secure the refrigerated train as it arrives at a Kharkiv tank factory before the bodies are loaded onto planes and flown back to the Netherlands
Journalists follow the train as it arrives in the city of Kharkiv, where the victims will be flown to the Netherlands
‘We will not leave until every remain has left this country so we will have to go on and bargain again with the people over there.’
Yesterday a train pulled into a station in the government-held city of Kharkiv in eastern-Ukraine at around 10am BST where Dutch investigators leading a probe into the disaster were waiting to take charge of the bodies.
A minute’s silence was held before the train’s doors were opened and international investigators finally began the gruesome task of trying to identify those inside.
There had been fears the bodies, including the ten Britons killed, would be used as a bargaining chip by pro-Russian separatists – believed to be behind the atrocity.
The train’s 185-mile journey from the crash site in the rebel-held village of Hrabove, eastern Ukraine, took 17 hours.
Last night an Australian air force plane and refrigerated trucks arrived in Holland to wait for the MH17 victims.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the first bodies would be flown to Eindhoven in the south of the country today to carry out a torturous identification process he warned could take months.
According to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, there are still human remains lying on the crash site.
Remembering the dead: A full-page obituary notice is printed in the national daily De Volkskrant with names of all 293 victims of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 issued by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte
'We observed the presence of smaller body parts at the site,' OSCE spokesman, Michael Bociurkiw, told a briefing in Ukraine's eastern city of Donetsk after his group inspected the site today.
He said all recovery efforts seem to have ended but that at the site his group saw a plastic bag with some human remains left behind while Malaysian experts noticed a strong smell indicating the likely presence of more remains in another spot.
'We've never really seen that intensive combing over the site - people arm in arm going over the fields,' Bociurkiw said, adding there was effectively no security at the site and that so far only a small number of international experts visited it.
It has also emerged that the cockpit is believed to have been sawn in half while under the control of Russian-backed separatists.
International monitors said large parts of the cockpit and every part of the fuselage were carried off questioning why such important pieces of evidence has been tampered with.
The separatists and Russia have denied shooting down the plane, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
An employee from the Dutch airline company KLM reaches out into a sea of flowers at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, where the doomed flight MH17 took off on Thursday
However, the cockpit was found in a section of the crash site which had been cordoned off for the first two days after the plane went down. Witnesses claim the cockpit had been cut in half with diesel-powered saws.
'The rear part of the aircraft, one of the biggest intact pieces, has definitely been hacked into,' Michael Bociurkiw, spokesman for the group of international monitors from the Organize for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), told USA Today.
After arriving in Eindhoven, the bodies will be taken to the Kaporaal van Oudheusden military barracks in Hilversum, around 100 kilometres (65 miles) away.
'As soon as a victim is identified first and foremost the family will be informed and no one else. That can take weeks or months,' said Mr Rutte.
In the central Dutch city of Utrecht, a team of 150 investigators has been pulled together to begin the grisly and painstaking task of trying to identify the victims.
They include police officers, military personnel, forensic dentists and other medics, who have been tasked with collecting samples from close relatives around the country to help identify the 193 Dutch victims.
President Barack Obama visits the Dutch Embassy in Washington to sign a book of condolence, joined by Deputy Chief of Mission Peter Mollema
Under fire: Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow as he promised to do everything possible to influence pro-Russian separatists to allow a full investigation of the crash
Jos van Roo, the team leader of the Dutch National Forensic Investigations Team, known as the LTFO, told the Wall Street Journal: 'We have been collecting DNA samples, hair, fingerprints, information about scars or tattoos or moles.'
He said this information would then be handed the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) which will use sophisticated software called Bonaparte to match those samples to the victims.
The NFI said this process was completed in an around 30 days during an investigation into a 2010 crash in Libya which killed 104 people.
But with nearly three times as many bodies to examine - and others yet to be found - it suggests this investigation could take many months.
LEADERS WHO USED TO PRAISE PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN
Since news broke of the downing of Flight MH17, Western politicians have been lining up to condemn Vladimir Putin. But they haven’t always been so condemnatory...
- Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, in June 2003: ‘He offers not just tremendous hope for Russia but also the wider world. And I would pay tribute to him as a partner and as a friend.’
- George W Bush, then US president, in June 2001: ‘I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.’
- Alex Salmond, leader of Scottish National Party, in May 2014: Pressed on whether he admires Putin: ‘Certain aspects. He’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride and that must be a good thing.’
- Prime Minister David Cameron in August 2012: ‘It has been very good to welcome President Putin back to Number 10 Downing Street, and to see this steady growth in British-Russian relations.’
- George Galloway, Respect MP, in December 2013: Regarding Russia’s position on Syria: ‘President Putin is my man of the year. And I don’t see how anyone could stand up against that nomination. He really has played a blinder.’
- Lord Mandelson in September 2013: He described a speech by Putin as ‘strong, interesting and encouraging’ and said Russia under Putin was moving ‘in the right direction’.
- Bill Clinton, former US president, in September 2013: ‘Mr Putin… he’s very smart. And, remarkably, we had a good, blunt relationship. He kept his word on all the deals we made.’
- Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary, in February 2000: ‘Mr Putin is clearly someone who wants Russia to engage with the outside world. I found his style refreshing and open and his priorities for Russians are the ones that I would share.’
- Silvio Berlusconi, then prime minister of Italy, in August 2003: ‘After the last century witnessed the confrontations between the West and the East, today’s East is declaring its desire to be part of the West, part of Europe. And this is thanks to President Putin.’
- Nigel Farage, leader of UK Independence Party, in May 2014: When asked: Which current world leader do you most admire? ‘As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant.’
Mr van Roo said the identification process has been so distressing even for experienced investigators that the team is being assessed by a psychologist on a daily basis.
There are still human remains on the site where a Malaysian passenger plane hit the ground in eastern Ukraine after being downed, a representative of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) watchdog said on Tuesday.
'We observed the presence of smaller body parts at the site,' an OSCE spokesman, Michael Bociurkiw, told a briefing in Ukraine's eastern city of Donetsk after his group inspected the site earlier in the day.
'We did not observe any recovery activity in place.'
The investigation has been all the more challenging after rebel militia were accused of allowing the crash site's desecration and obstructing the process of recovering the bodies of the 298 victims.
In some cases, remains have been left out for more than two days in sweltering heat and to compound matters the refrigeration unit on the train carrying them to Donetsk reportedly broke down.
Vocal: Malaysian activists hold banners during a protest at the United Nations office in Kuala Lumpur to demand justice for the 298 victims of the MH17 crash
Ukrainian officials said 282 corpses have been found, along with 87 fragments from 16 bodies.
But there are fears some body parts may have been incinerated as aircraft wreckage exploded, making identification even more difficult.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said, in reference to his own citizens, that following any necessary forensic work, the remains of Malaysian citizens will then be flown home to Malaysia.
The same process is expected to follow for the citizens of other countries.
Pro-Russian separatists - who stand accused of bringing down the aircraft, possibly with a missile supplied by Moscow - bowed to a furious clamour for the bodies and black boxes to be handed to investigators five days after the crash.
Mr Razak said the boxes were handed over to the Malaysian team in Donetsk at 9pm Ukraine time last night.
The small handing over ceremony has finally solved the question as to what had happened to the two vital devices.
It was not immediately known what the Malaysian team would do with the black boxes, but there was speculation they would pass the boxes on to experts with experience of reading the data.
Mr Najib revealed that in recent days the team had been working quietly behind the scenes to establish contact with 'those' - a reference to the rebels - in charge of the MH17 crash site.
The contact was finally made - but he made it clear it had not been easy.
'Under difficult and fluid circumstances, we have been discussing the problems that have occupied us all - securing vital evidence from the aircraft, launching an independent investigation and above all recovering the remains of those who lost their lives.'
The Prime Minister said that in another breakthrough an independent international investigation team would be guaranteed safe access to the crash site.
'I must stress that although agreement has been reached, there remain a number of steps required before it is completed,' said Mr Razak.
'There is work still to be done, work which relies on continued communication in good faith. Mr Borodai (rebel leader) and his people have so far given their co-operation.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2701180/MH17-death-train-carrying-282-victims-finally-arrives-government-held-city-Kharkiv-flown-Netherlands-identification.html#ixzz38KSG88wb
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