200 or so Jet Bodies Arrive at The Netherlands

As a military trumpet sounded in tribute, the first bodies of victims from the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash arrived in the Netherlands on Wednesday after an airborne journey from Ukraine.Sixteen coffins were aboard a Dutch military flight and 24 aboard an Australian jet, both of which left the northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv after a solemn ceremony. They landed a couple of hours later at Amsterdam’s small Eindhoven airport to a somber reception from King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima, Prime Minister Mark Rutte and others.   

 Bodies of victims and the flight recorders from the Malaysia Airlines jetliner destroyed by a missile last week over eastern Ukraine were delivered by a lumbering freight train Tuesday to Kharkiv, a city controlled by the central government, completing the initial phases of an agreement with pro-Russian rebels negotiated by Malaysia.

But international anger was still swelling about the mistreatment of the victims — whose corpses lay for days strewn across a wheat field — the pilfering of their belongings, and the removal of possible evidence that could determine the weapon used to destroy the plane.

In addition, discrepancies emerged Tuesday about the precise number of bodies recovered from the crash site.

Malaysian officials and Ukrainian separatist leaders said Monday that 282 bodies and the parts of 16 others were placed aboard the train, totaling 298, the number of passengers and crew who perished. But a Dutch forensics official in Kharkiv, Jain Tuinder, was quoted by the BBC as saying that only 200 bodies were on the train and that another search for more remains would be required.

“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,” he was quoted as saying.

Ukrainian, European, and US officials have said a Russian-made antiaircraft missile supplied to the rebels downed the jetliner.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the rebel leaders whose cause he has supported have strongly denied any responsibility. But the rage aimed in their direction was reflected in the words of Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia, whose country lost 37 citizens and residents.

“Anyone who has been watching the latest footage would appreciate that there is still a long, long way to go. After the crime comes the cover-up,” Abbott said, in reaction to images of separatist militants seen rummaging through the wreckage. “What we have seen is evidence tampering on an industrial scale, and, obviously, that has to stop.”

European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels agreed Tuesday to expand the list of Russian entities and individuals subject to asset freezes and travel bans.

They also threatened to target major parts of the Russian economy if Moscow does not bring the uprising under control, but they stopped short of immediately imposing sanctions that could cripple the Russian economy.

Despite the agreement with Malaysia, heavily armed rebels who control the crash site have so far prevented foreign and Ukrainian experts from examining the wreckage or moving it to a more secure location.

Volodymyr Groysman, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, who is leading a Ukrainian team handling the Malaysia Airlines disaster, said that the pro-Russian rebels had slowed the repatriation of bodies and efforts to investigate responsibility.

“Unfortunately, it has taken a long time for the train to get here from the crash site because of obstructions created by the bandits and terrorists,” he said in Kharkiv, using the Ukraine government’s terminology for the pro-Russia separatists.

Flight 17 was hit at 33,000 feet en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, exploding and crashing about 20 miles from the border with Russia. All aboard were killed: two-thirds of them Dutch, and the rest from more than half a dozen countries.

Pushed by a diesel locomotive, the train carrying the bodies of the victims, in five gray refrigerated wagons, arrived in Kharkiv after a 17-hour journey out of the lawless territory of the crash site.

Also aboard the train, foreign officials said, were the black boxes, which were handed over by rebel leaders to Malaysian emissaries Monday in the separatist movement’s self-proclaimed capital of Donetsk.

Ukrainian workers had to clear the track of mud and weeds to allow the train to pass along a long-disused stretch of rail leading to an old Soviet-era tank factory, where the bodies were removed.

The work on the tracks, however, did not prevent the train from stalling just a few yards from its final destination. Workers threw sand on the tracks to give the locomotive more traction.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said in a Twitter message Tuesday that the Malaysians had asked forensics experts in Britain to investigate the contents of the black boxes, which could provide some clues into what was happening aboard the aircraft immediately before its destruction.

The Netherlands sent a Hercules transport plane to Kharkiv, and Australia said it was also sending a plane. All of the bodies will be taken to the Netherlands first and then returned to their home countries once they have been identified.

Ester Naber, a Dutch police spokeswoman, said the victims would all be repacked in new body bags, placed in wooden coffins, and flown to the Netherlands in a process that would likely start Wednesday. She said the bodies would be flown to a military airfield at Eindhoven and transferred to a military base at Hilversum.

The victims will be returned to their home countries once identifications have been completed, a process that Naber said “could take weeks or even months depending on the state of the bodies.”

In Kiev, the Ukraine capital, a government spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said Ukrainian forces had seized control of several small strategic towns in eastern Ukraine, blocking the main roads between the regional capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk .