AIR crash investigators are to rebuild Malaysian Airlines flight
MH17 piece by piece to conclusively show who shot down the aircraft killing 298
people on-board including 31 Australians.
Today a small memorial was held in Eindoven as six coffins carrying human
remains were repatriated, four months after the airline was brought down over
east Ukraine by a suspected ground-to-air missile.
A similar service was held in Kharkiv in Ukraine as the bodies left, with a
large contingent of cadets from local military schools and two dozen Dutch and
local police forming an impromptu honour guard.
Despite the six repatriations, authorities confirmed there were still nine
bodies still to be recovered. With the first snow of winter beginning to fall
across east Ukraine yesterday and temperatures plunging to minus 10, they
confirmed however all further efforts to recover aircraft and human remains
would have to be suspended until next April.
“But our work is still not finished, our goal is to find and identify all
victims,” a spokesman said.
What parts of the aircraft that had been salvaged from the conflict zone
about the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in east Ukraine were today sitting in 11
open and one closed freight train cars at the Osnova train station outside of
central Kharkiv.
From tomorrow, the wreckage will be loaded onto trucks and taken to the
airport where they will be flown to the Netherlands with that process expected
to take all week with each part catalogued and marked.
Their return to a hangar in Netherlands will allow air crash investigators
to begin a partial reconstruction in much the same way air crash investigators
meticulously pieced together Pan Am flight 103 to establish it was downed over
Scotland by an on-board bomb 26 years ago.
Authorities want to show conclusively what brought MH17 down amid a growing
publicity campaign by Russian state media that it was a Ukraine jet fighter
that shot the aircraft down either by design to drag the West into the conflict
or by accident. Ukraine and Western authorities maintain it was a ground-to-air
missile fired by Russian-backed militia that blew the aircraft out of the
skies.
Meanwhile Moscow today urged the European Union to lift sanctions against
the country in exchange for Russia lifting its ban on Western food imports that
are worth $9 billion a year.
But instead the EU announced a fresh round of sanctions against the Russian
State, specifically against 13 Russian-backed Ukraine groups.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the new president of the European Commission, said
Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in March left Europe with two
options: go to war against Russia or impose economic sanctions.
“If you don’t want a war the only possibility is sanctions ... You have to
take sanctions that produce an effect,” Mr Juncker said.
Image : Source
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