Reuters

A train carrying the remains of many of the 298 victims of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 arrived in a Ukrainian government-held city yesterday on the first leg of their final journey home to be reclaimed by their families.

Five refrigerated wagons containing 200 body bags reached the city of Kharkiv after pro-Russian separatists agreed to hand over the plane’s black boxes to Malaysian authorities and the bodies to the Netherlands, where many victims had lived.

The train slowly rolled into the grounds of an arms industry plant, where the remains are due to be unloaded and flown to the Netherlands for the lengthy process of identification.

A spokeswoman for a Dutch team of forensic experts in Kharkiv said departure was not expected before today.

The Malaysia Airlines plane was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down on July 17 near Donetsk, a stronghold of pro-Russian rebels, where fighting with Ukrainian troops flared again yesterday.

Malaysia said it would send the black boxes to a British lab for analysis.

“Here they are, the black boxes,” separatist leader Aleksander Borodai told journalists at the headquarters of his self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” as an armed rebel placed the boxes on a desk.

A small group of Malaysian air crash experts became the first international accident investigators to reach the site yesterday, escorted by a convoy of international monitors and heavily armed separatist fighters.

The shooting down of the airliner has sharply deepened the Ukrainian crisis, in which separatist gunmen in the Russian-speaking east have been fighting government forces since pro-Western protesters in Kiev forced out a pro-Moscow president and Russia annexed Crimea in March.

Shaken by the deaths of nearly 300 people on the Malaysian airliner, Western governments have threatened Russia with stiffer penalties.

European Union foreign ministers were meeting yesterday to discuss further penalties against Russia, but the most they are expected to do is to speed up implementation of sanctions against individuals, and possibly companies, agreed in principle last week before the plane was brought down.

Diplomats say that more serious sanctions against whole sectors of the Russian economy will depend largely on the line taken by the Dutch, because of the high number of Dutch victims.

At the United Nations, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on Monday demanding those responsible “be held to account and that all states co-operate fully with efforts to establish accountability”.

It also demanded that armed groups allow “safe, secure, full and unrestricted access” to the crash site.

Putin noted an increased use of language of “ultimatums and sanctions” towards Russia and called for more dialogue with the West.

European security monitors said gunmen stopped them inspecting the site on Friday and Ukrainian officials have said separatists tampered with evidence at the crash site.

But the spokesman for the European security monitors said they had unfettered access on Monday, and a Dutch victims identification team was allowed to inspect the storage of the bodies in refrigerated rail cars before they left for Kharkiv.

The Malaysian crash experts walked through the wheat fields by the wreckage, making notes and taking photographs yesterday.

Russia’s defence ministry has challenged Western accusations that pro-Russian separatists were responsible for shooting down the airliner and said Ukrainian warplanes had flown close to it.

The ministry also rejected accusations that Russia had supplied the rebels with SA-11 Buk anti-aircraft missile systems – the weapon said by Kiev and the West to have downed the airliner – “or any other weapons”.

 

OSCE says body parts still on site of plane crash

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 Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) watchdog said yesterday.

“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.”

 

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