More Than 60 Forensic Experts Arrive at Malaysia Airline Crash Site
KYIV – More than 60 Dutch and Australian forensic experts arrived on Friday at the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines plane that was downed July 17 in eastern Ukraine for their second day of investigations, as fighting in the area continued between pro-Russian separatists and Government forces.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which has sent observers to accompany the investigators, confirmed the arrival of the team and said recovery work had started immediately.
In the days after the crash Ukrainian militias recovered what they said were the bodies and remains of 282 of the 298 passengers on the plane, but at least 16 victims have been unaccounted for.
Australia and the Netherlands, the two countries with the largest number of nationals on board, believe there are even more bodies still trapped in the wreckage.
A small exploratory team of experts visited the site Thursday following a one-day truce declared by the Ukrainian Government to allow access to the area, in the region of Donetsk partially controlled by the separatists.
Fighting continued on Friday only a few miles from the village of Grabove where the plane came down.
At least 10 Ukrainian soldiers were reported killed in an ambush by pro-Russian separatists near the town of Shakhtiorsk.
Ukrainian Government spokesman Alexei Dmitrahovki told local news agencies 14 people had died in the attack, but so far only 10 had been identified and it was not known whether the other four were rebels.
Other military sources quoted by the online TV channel Hromadske.tv said the number of deceased soldiers could be as high as 21 and added that “there were many injured.”
Over the past few days the Ukrainian Army had launched a sweeping offensive on Shakhtiorsk, Torez and Snezhnoe, the cities closest to the crash site, to guarantee safe access to the international experts investigating the disaster.
Fifty other Ukrainian soldiers, including members of the airborne forces, were reported wounded in the last 24 hours and taken to hospital in Dnepropetrovsk, after they were caught in another separatist ambush.