Kharkiv, Ukraine: A train carrying bodies and black boxes from a shot-down Malaysia Airlines flight arrived in this eastern Ukrainian city on Tuesday morning, but the remains of nearly a third of the people aboard the plane were missing, a Dutch forensics expert said.
Only 200 bodies were aboard the train that arrived in Kharkiv from the eastern war zone Tuesday, said Jan Tuinder, the head of an international team of forensics experts tasked with preparing the bodies for transport to Holland. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was carrying 298 passengers and crew when it was shot down by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile on Thursday over territory held by Moscow-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, US and Ukrainian authorities have said.
The number of bodies that arrived in the train’s refrigerated rail cars was significantly lower than the 282 bodies, plus 87 body parts believed to belong to the remaining 16 victims, that Ukrainian officials have said were recovered. The train, which left the rebel-held mining town of Torez on Monday night, took more than 17 hours to travel a route that normally takes five hours or less.
Asked about the discrepancy, Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said on Tuesday in Donetsk that 290 was “the last number [of bodies] we were told” had been recovered. “We had no possible way to verify that count,” he said.
He said an international group of observers saw body parts at the crash site Tuesday. There still has not been any systematic attempt to comb the scene for all human remains, he said.
Mr Tuinder said he did not know the whereabouts of the missing bodies.
“The only thing I’m sure of is the number 200,” he said, characterising it as a “hard” count. Of the remaining victims, he said: “They will be found. We have to find them.”
The train, which had been held up for days in Torez near the crash site, arrived about 12:30pm on Tuesday in Kharkiv, where more than 90 forensics experts and about 30 diplomats waited for it at a small, secondary train station.
“It was a very emotional moment, when the train stopped in an area somewhere in a foreign country,” Mr Tuinder said. “It was a very respectful moment. It was very quiet.”
The first group of bodies will be flown to Holland on Wednesday morning, officials said.
The remains were being processed by forensics experts from the Netherlands, France, Malaysia and Australia — all countries whose citizens died in the crash. They were placing the remains in stronger body bags and putting them in sealed coffins for transfer to the Netherlands, where the process of identifying the victims would start.
The delivery of the bodies and the plane’s data and cockpit voice recorders offered some hope that an international investigation might clarify how the civilian airliner was shot down. Experts warned, however, that the crash site has been compromised.
The vast main site of the plane crash was secured by only two men with rifles on Tuesday, despite an international outcry for an impartial investigation to begin there as soon as possible.