DONETSK, November 20. /TASS/. Emergency teams in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) have collected more than 100 tons of wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet crash site to transfer it to the Netherlands, the DPR Emergencies Ministry said on Thursday.
“Only on Wednesday, we collected over 10 tons of debris. In general, we collect around 30 or 40 tons every day,” the ministry’s press service said.
Reconstructing parts of the airliner which went down in eastern Ukraine is a key effort to establish cause of the crash, Dutch Safety Board spokesman Wim van der Weegen told TASS on Tuesday.
The wreckage collection works could be completed by the end of this week but the effort largely depends on security and weather conditions at the crash site, he said.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, some 60 km (over 37 miles) from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk self-defense forces and the Ukrainian army. All the passengers and crewmembers onboard the aircraft — 298 people — died. Most of the passengers — 196 people — were Dutch citizens.