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 (out of 298 passengers)

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.



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.





‘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.