The work of the international expert mission at the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing 777 in Donetsk region, will last until the remains of all the crash victims and their belongings are found, the head of the mission, Peter-Jap Albersberg, has said.
“Despite the fact that many people are currently working at the site, certain time is needed to collect the bodies and remains of the victims and their personal belongings. The mission has still not been completed,” he said at a briefing in crisis media center in Kyiv on Aug. 6.
Albersberg also said that experts had found no human remains at the crash site in the past three days. Over the past few days, the mission experts determined which part of the crash had not yet been examined, which partly explains why the team had not found any human remains in the past three days, the head of the mission said.
According to him, the experts have been working for six days in a row now, the team consists of around a hundred people, who are accompanied by representatives of the OSCE.
Albersberg also appealed to local residents to bring the belongings of the killed passengers of the aircraft, which they might have found, to the experts.
He also said thanked residents of Soledar for their assistance, as they were helping in organizing volunteers’ work, preparing food, etc.
The state commission for the inquiry into the Boeing 777 crash said earlier that the group of international experts, who were working at the crash on Wednesday, decided to return to the place of their deployment in Soledar, Donetsk region, as there was shooting by insurgents who control the area.
The state commission said that during the search operations on Monday some personal belongings of passengers killed in the airliner crash were found, in particular a passport and photo albums. However, the search on Monday lasted only for half an hour because gunfire was heard not far from the crash site.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all the 298 people aboard. The victims included 192 nationals of the Netherlands (one of them also had U.S. citizenship), 44 Malaysia (including 15 crewmembers), 27 Australia, 12 Indonesia, 10 the United Kingdom (one of them also had South African Republic citizenship), four Germany, four Belgium, three the Philippines, one Canada, and one New Zealand.
