THE HAGUE, January 10. /TASS/. Materials seized from Dutch journalists who visited Ukraine’s troubled Donbass will be investigated by police, Wim de Bruin, Press Officer of the National Public Prosecutor’s Office told Tass on Tuesday.
"These goods will be inspected by the police," he said.
Journalists Stefan Beck and Michel Spekkers spent nine days in Donbass at the end of December - early in January, where they familiarized themselves with the general political situation and visited the MH17 crash site.
Dutch law enforcement agencies detained both at the airport upon their return home on January 7, confiscating all materials gathered on the MH17 crash, as well as cameras, cellphones and notebooks. The Public Prosecutor’s Office said it feared the journalists would refuse to voluntarily pass the materials to investigators.
Michel Spekkers said he had collected and brought to the Netherlands some fragments of the crashed Boeing as well as a bone fragment.
"I took one fragment of the bone with me to investigate here what kind of bone it is. But I don’t know for sure (if it was human remaining), I cannot confirm. What I do know is when they confiscated it, two forensic policemen were there and they decided to send it to the lab for more investigation," the journalist said.
On July 17, 2014, Flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, en route from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. All the 283 passengers and 15 crew members, nationals from ten countries, died in the airplane disaster. Most passengers were Dutch nationals. Ukraine’s authorities and the militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic accused each other of the tragedy. Dutch authorities have been investigating the crash.