You're reading: Australian experts ready to work at Malaysian plane crash site in east Ukraine

Australian experts are ready to arrive at the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing-777 airliner in Donetsk region, but the security situation there has currently worsened, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has said.

“Australia is committed to returning to the site, when it is safe to do so, and in the company of our Dutch and Malaysian partners. We are deeply concerned by reports that OSCE observers were gravely endangered during the course of a recent agreed monitoring mission. The observers were shelled en route to the site, and later threatened with violence by armed groups,” she said at a meeting of the UN Security Council on Friday, Sept. 19.

She said that these incidents show that it is still unsafe to return to the site.

“The security situation around the site and in much of eastern Ukraine has deteriorated because of Russian support to armed separatists groups. That support continues and it must cease,” Bishop said.

She also noted that the Australian government was investigating the circumstances of the crash.

“The Australian government’s initial assessment was that MH17 had been shot down by a surface to air missile,” she said.

Bishop recalled that as of Sept. 19, 225 victims had been identified by the Identification Commission in The Hague, including a number of Australians.

“Substantial progress has been made, but the identification process has been slow given the circumstances of this crash,” she added.

The Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing 777, which was flying from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17. All 298 people on board were killed. They included 192 Dutch citizens (one also had U.S. citizenship), 44 Malaysians, including the 15 crew members, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, ten Britons (one also had South African nationality), four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.

The Dutch Safety Board published a preliminary report on an investigation into the MH17 crash on Sept. 9, which says that the plane was technically sound and broke up in the air probably as a result of structural damage caused by a large number of objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside