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July 28, 2014

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Police cancel trip to MH17 site after reports of clashes

Source: Agencies | July 28, 2014, Monday | Print Edition

A TEAM of police officers that had planned to start searching for evidence and bodies at the site of the Malaysian plane disaster in eastern Ukraine canceled their trip yesterday after reports of fighting in the area.

Alexander Hug, deputy head of a monitoring team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it was too dangerous for the unarmed officers to travel to the site from its current location in Donetsk.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile over a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian rebels on July 17, killing all 298 people on board.

A Ukrainian defense official said government forces were undertaking efforts to clear areas around the Boeing 777 crash site of rebels.

Hug said the police mission, comprised of officers from the Netherlands and Australia, will reconsider resuming operations if security improves. Malaysian experts are also due to join them.

“We continue to reassess the situation continuously and we will start to redeploy tomorrow morning back to the site if the situation changes,” Hug said.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said earlier that unarmed Australian police would be part of the Dutch-led police force to secure the area and help recover victims’ remains.

“This is a risky mission. There’s no doubt about that,” Abbott said. “But all the professional advice that I have is that the safest way to conduct it is unarmed, as part of a police-led humanitarian mission.”

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said his country would send dozens of police and assurances had been received from pro-Russia rebels that they would provide protection for investigators.

Ten days after the disaster, a fully-fledged investigation has not yet begun at the site, compromising evidence and leaving some bodies still unrecovered. Concerns about the integrity of the site were raised further when a couple who had flown from their home in Perth, Australia, visited the wreckage-strewn fields on Saturday outside the village of Hrabove and even sat on part of plane’s wreckage.

Flights from Ukraine to the Netherlands have taken 227 coffins containing victims of the disaster. Officials say the exact number of people held in the coffins still needs to be determined by forensic experts.

Ukraine’s National Security Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko said yesterday that Ukrainian troops were engaging rebels at several locations, including near Debaltseve, 25 kilometers northwest of the crash site.

There was also fighting on the outskirts of Horlivka, one of the rebels’ key strongholds. He said more than 20 rebels were killed and eight of their armored vehicles destroyed during fighting in Horlivka.

One government soldier was killed in the previous day’s fighting, Lysenko said.

The Malaysia Airlines disaster has prompted some speculation in the West that Russia would scale back its “involvement” in the uprising in Ukraine’s east, but the opposite seems to be the case.

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