Heavy fighting around the MH17 crash scene in eastern Ukraine prevented Dutch forensics experts and Australian police from reaching the area yesterday, convincing the two governments that the region remains too volatile to send an armed military mission to secure the site.
Emerging from a cabinet meeting, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said that although all scenarios had been examined an armed mission was now regarded as "unrealistic" given the fighting, while his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott agreed that the safest option was an unarmed operation.
Access for the investigators is being negotiated locally with pro-Russian separatists by officials from the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), and although the 41-strong team – 30 Dutch and 11 Australians – began the journey to the site in armoured SUVs, it had to be abandoned.
“The situation appears to be unsafe, and fighting in that area will most likely affect the crash site”, said Alexander Hug, deputy head of the OSCE mission. He said another attempt to reach the location near the village of Grabovo would be made this morning.
Local frustration, reflected in international capitals, was underlined by the fact that, as the investigators set out, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said an agreement had been reached with separatist leader Aleksander Borodai that he hoped would “ensure security on the ground”.
Forty-three Malaysians, including 15 crew, were killed in the disaster, and Mr Najib – who is due to meet Mr Rutte on Wednesday – said the separatists had fulfilled two of three previously agreed commitments, returning the dead and handing over the black boxes, and should now allow access to the site.
Unarmed police It was a frustrating weekend too for Mr Rutte, who placed troops on standby on Friday. However, the cabinet had decided, he said last night, that retrieval of bodies remained the main goal, and that goal could be jeopardised if anything were done to escalate tensions – although more unarmed police would be sent.
Mr Abbott agreed: “This is a risky mission, no doubt about that. But all the professional advice I have is that the safest way to conduct it is unarmed, as a police-led humanitarian mission.”
As attempts to reach and secure the crash site continue, 38 more bodies were flown home from Kharkiv to Eindhoven on Saturday, the final flight across the “air bridge” until investigators can gather more remains.
Previous flights have been on weekdays, but yesterday’s was marked by the biggest crowds yet, with thousands of people of all ages lining the route from Eindhoven to Hilversum, where identification is being carried out – and where 227 of the 298 passengers and crew have so far arrived to, as one official put it, “be given back their names”.
Elsewhere, a 93-year-old grandfather succumbed to what his family called “the indescribable grief” of losing his daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren in the crash. His family said in a weekend death notice that Henk Palm, from the northern town of Roden, died on Tuesday – five days after the aircraft was apparently shot down.
