A Dutch officer stands at attention in front of the plane carrying the coffins with the last seven remains of Dutch victims of the MH17 plane crash, after it arrived at Eindhoven Airport in Eindhoven.
DPA/Amsterdam
More than nine months after Malaysian flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine, the last of the remains of the 298 victims arrived in the Netherlands yesterday.
A Dutch army transporter with seven coffins on board landed at a military airport in Eindhoven to be greeted by ministers and relatives for a short ceremony.
The remains were then taken in a long convoy along motorways closed to all other traffic to Hilversum, near Amsterdam, where investigations into the cause of the crash would take place.
The flight was the 10th to arrive from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and marked the end of the operation to remove all the remains from the site of the downed Malaysia Airlines flight, believed to have been shot down by a missile on July 17, 2014.
The flight had been on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
A total of 250 coffins have been transported to the Netherlands.
The power of the explosion was so great that body parts were strewn over a radius that was kilometres wide.
All 298 passengers and crew on board the flight, most of whom were Dutch, died. Two of the victims have not yet been identified.
In recent weeks, international experts have been allowed back to the site of the crash, in a conflict-ridden part of Ukraine, where they carried out investigations and dug up to 60cm into the ground.
They found body parts, debris, passports, and luggage.
The official investigation in Ukraine has now ended.
“We have done all that is humanly possible,” said Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, leader of the recovery team.
Yesterday’s flight also fulfilled Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s promise in July to get all the remains home before starting the investigation proper.
As most of the victims were Dutch, the Dutch government took on the leadership of the recovery operation and investigation into the causes of the crash.
