THE HAGUE, October 31. /TASS/. Human remains have been discovered at the site of the recent Malaysian plane crash near the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Friday.
“Experts [from the Netherlands, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe managed to find the remains of passengers that will now be transported to Kharkov, and later to the Netherlands after a forensic examination,” Rutte told journalists.
He said the situation around the crash site is constantly changing. “One day, it’s quiet, next day there is fierce fighting there,” he said.
On July 17, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 passenger airliner on flight MH17 from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Most passengers - 193 people - were Dutch nationals.
The Dutch Safety Board, which is leading the probe and coordinating the international team of investigators, said in its preliminary report published September 9 that “Flight MH17 with a Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.”
According to the UN, more than 4,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s war-torn southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, conducted since mid-April, to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics.
The parties to the Ukrainian conflict agreed on cessation of fire during OSCE-mediated talks on September 5 in Belarusian capital Minsk. The long awaited ceasefire took effect the same day.