A train carrying the remains of victims of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has arrived in the Ukrainian government-held city of Kharkiv, finally leaving the conflict zone where the bodies had remained in rebel hands since the suspected shooting down of the Boeing 777 on Thursday.
The five-carriage train, including three refrigerated wagons for the 282 bodies, came to a halt in the grounds of a weapons factory from where the bodies will be unloaded before being flown to the Netherlands. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, said he expected the first of the bodies to arrive on Wednesday.
Ukraine has given the Netherlands the lead role in investigating the cause of the crash.
The precise number of bodies on the train has not been verified. Ukrainian authorities said that 282 bodies, plus body parts from an additional 16 victims, had been recovered. Malaysia Airlines said that 282 bodies were on the train. The self-styled prime minister of the "Donetsk people's republic", Alexander Borodai, said there were a further 87 body fragments, but did not say how many people these might represent.
There were 293 people in total on the downed flight.
It was initially thought that the remains would be examined by a team of specialists once they arrived in Kharkiv, where Ukrainian officials said a crisis centre had been prepared to store the remains and hotels were ready to receive relatives. But on Monday, Ukraine's deputy prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, said all bodies would be taken to the Netherlands.
A spokeswoman for a Dutch team of forensic experts on the site in Kharkiv on Tuesday said that the next leg in journey was not expected to happen before Wednesday. It was unclear whether any of the forensic experts from Malaysia and the Netherlands, who arrived in Donetsk over the past two days, accompanied the train into government-controlled territory.
The train left Torez – where the bodies had been sitting for more than 24 hours – at about 7pm but stopped overnight in Donetsk before leaving at about 3am, Ukraine's emergency services ministry said.
The conditions in which the bodies have been kept and transported, as well as the delays in repatriation, have sparked outrage in the international community and angered the distraught families of victims.
According to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the three train carriages where the bodies were stored were kept at between 0C and -5C, but after more than 48 hours out open to the elements, including rain and sweltering heat, there has already been a rapid deterioration in the composition of the remains.
Fierce fighting has continued to flare across eastern Ukraine. On Monday, as the final 20 bodies were transported from the crash site to the train station in Torez, Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, ordered a ceasefire within a 40km(24-mile) radius around the area. But for the previous four days, however, the boom of heavy artillery had been audible at the Grabovo crash site as emergency service workers removed the human remains from the fields.
Fighting around Donetsk airport and railway station on Monday, just outside the ceasefire zone, reportedly killed three civilians and further complicated transportation arrangements, according to the rebels. But late-night wrangling between Malaysian officials and the leaders of the rebel republic suggested that there might be other reasons for the delay.
Borodai negotiated with a Malaysian delegation into the early hours of Tuesday morning. The result appeared to be a deal that secured the safe passage of the MH17 victims' bodies out of the rebel-held territory, the handover of the black boxes, and unfettered access to the crash site for international investigators. But in return the Malaysians seemed to offer the rebels a semblance of legitimacy.
Col Mohamad Sakri, part of the Malaysian delegation, thanked "his excellency Mr Borodai" for agreeing to the transfer.
The Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, on Tuesday said "there were risks involved" in making the deal with the separatists, for which he had spoken by telephone to Borodai.
"We felt an obligation to explore all avenues to break the impasse, and secure the return of the remains and the black boxes. After meeting the families, I felt that we owed it to them to act," he said in statement.
The rebels had so far met the first two conditions of the deal – to hand over the black boxes and the remains of some 282 victims – and that the third, to allow full access to the crash site, was ongoing, the statement said.
Razak confirmed that the boxes appeared to be in good condition. He said they would be held in Malaysian custody while an international investigation team was formalised, after which they would be passed to the international team.
Kiev and its western allies have accused the pro-Russia rebels of obstructing access to the site, which gunmen took control of shortly after the plane crashed.
Monday was the first time that international forensic experts had been able to view the bodies and visit the crash site.
A team of three Dutch specialists who visited concluded that the conditions for storing the bodies were "acceptable" and stated that they were impressed with the efforts of the emergency service workers who had conducted the recovery operation on the site, which stretches several square miles
No comments:
Post a Comment