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MH17 wreckage could be removed by weekend — Dutch Security Council

The recovery work have been organized with the aim to partially reconstruct the plane in the Netherlands later in order to fully investigate the cause of the crash

THE HAGUE, November 17. /TASS/. Work to remove the wreckage of doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 may probably be completed by the end of the week, a spokeswoman of the Netherlands’ Security Council, Sarah Vernoy, told journalists on Monday.

She said recovery work at the wreckage site was conducted on Monday as planned.

“We have already been collecting the jet fragments for two days consequently and today we have finally managed to reach the rear of the plane. All the fragments we have collected will be transported to the Ukrainian city of Torez, where they will be loaded on a train to be taken to Kharkiv then,” Vernoy said. “If the situation stays stable here and there are no changes, we will continue working at the site tomorrow and will be probably able to finish the whole process within five days.”

The recovery work have been organized with the aim to partially reconstruct the plane in the Netherlands later in order to fully investigate the cause of the crash.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in war-torn eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region on July 17, killing all 298 on board. As many as 196 making the majority of passengers were Dutch citizens.

The work on removing wreckage of the airplane became possible after representatives of the Netherlands, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) signed a relevant protocol on Saturday, November 15. Before that, the Dutch side refused to sign the document claiming it did not support some of the provisions in it. Besides, experts and investigators were unable to access the crash site due to continuous shelling on the territory.