TAKING ON MISSION (NEAR) IMPOSSIBLE

It was a civilian car, something like an Uber, that drove them into the city of Donetsk, a literal war zone that to AFP Commander Hilda Sirec looked just like a grassy, green Afghanistan.

She’d spent 12 months in the now-Taliban controlled nation and the sliver of conflicted land on the Russian border looked much the same: dugouts, men with guns in mismatched uniforms, tanks and craters where mortars had scored holes in the earth.

Outside the car window, a bridge was half collapsed and a train buckled and looped over broken tracks.

The rubble of bridge and train, destroyed by a mortar, had been abandoned in this war-ravaged region where separatists and soldiers fought for territory while villagers and farmers went about their day.

Sirec and her AFP colleague, Anthony Fox, along with two Australian Defence Force attaches, were heading to a crime scene they had no jurisdiction over, where they could collect no evidence and talk to no witnesses.

A crime scene that was so large, it covered 50sq km of farmland, homes and villages.

Just a few days earlier, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, with 283 passengers and 15 crew on board, had exploded at altitude, raining down bodies and debris over it all. Bodies had crashed through ceilings and bodies had landed in fields, still strapped into plane seats. Some were naked, as though they’d been “undressed by the air”, one separatist fighter told the media.

In the months that followed, Australian investigators would hire a tank, talk their way past armed men at border checkpoints – and even get a warning they could have inadvertently sparked a “world war”.

Their job: To find answers and return the 27 Australians and the 11 that called Australia home back to their families. Sirec, one of the first to arrive in Ukraine, had not expected to make it into the crime scene, but here she was, walking among suitcases and body parts, on ground blackened by an explosion of jet fuel. They would later divide the massive scene into five sections. In one, an engine sat in a blackened paddock, the stench of jet fuel so overpowering they’d need to wear masks. Nearby, at an overgrown, abandoned chicken farm, a wing jutted out of a dam. On the ground were small pieces of body – the parts that hadn’t been removed in the initial sweep by volunteer coal miners, separatists and whoever else had come into the crash site.

Small pieces of hand. A finger. Part of a small pelvis.

And she thought: These were children.

In a sunflower field, bright yellow flowers, 6ft tall, smiled at the sky. Among them were parts of the cockpit. Plane chairs, some intact, some not. Yellow oxygen masks littered the ground.

And she thought: Had they known? Had they been awake when the masks dropped?

In yet another area, piles of rubbish, collected by locals, waited for authorities. Plane debris had been piled separate to personal items.

Sirec picked up a travel diary and flipped through its pages.

She thought: This is it. This is what we’ve come here to do.

“For me,” she said, “to be able to get into the crash site was about finding out what was going on, to get answers, to find out who’s responsible. But also to collect things for the families of the victims. Because that’s it for them. That’s maybe the last thing the families have got to remember their friends and family by.”

In the pile she saw a few items belonging to an Australian woman, Helena Sidelik. Prescription sunglasses, a boarding pass.

And while personal effects were eventually returned to families, at that point, AFP officers had been told they were not to remove anything.

“And I just thought, this is what represents that woman in this moment in time,” Sirec said.

“It was hard for me to leave that there. It was like we were leaving the story of that person there.”

THE FATEFUL FLIGHT

Malaysia Airlines flight 17 took off from Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport shortly after noon on July 17, 2014, headed for Kuala Lumpur.

The pilot climbed to 33,000 feet as the plane passed over Germany and then Poland. Near the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, the flight crew spoke with local air traffic controllers about a Singapore Airlines flight that would pass above them.

At 4pm, MH17 requested to move slightly off course to avoid some weather. Another request soon after, to move to a higher altitude, was denied because the flight level was not available.

At 4.20pm, air traffic controllers from Ukraine attempted to contact MH17 to hand the flight over to Russian air traffic control. MH17 did not respond.

The last flight data recording of the passenger plane put it near the Ukrainian city of Hrabove.

Below, in a field, in pro-Russian separatist controlled territory, a Buk surface-to-air missile was fired at the passing plane. The missile shot through the air, exploding just above the cockpit.

At 4.20pm, MH17 broke up at 33,000 feet and 298 bodies fell to the ground.

In Australia, dozens of families woke to phone calls, to text messages, to television and radio reports about a plane shot down on the other side of the world.

Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, partners and friends searched frantically for flight itineraries.

Time stopped. Maybe it wasn’t their flight? Maybe they hadn’t boarded. Maybe they’d been late and missed the plane.

How does someone from Australia, someone who’d been on an overseas holiday, find themselves a casualty of a war that has nothing to do with them? Frantic calls to those on board, to DFAT. For many, it would be 12 hours before they’d be told definitively: your family member passed through customs and was on board Malaysia Airlines flight 17. We’re very sorry.

SEARCHING FOR CULPRITS

The evidence began pointing to Russia almost immediately. Just a few months later, as Brisbane prepared to host the G20 summit, then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott threatened to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin when he arrived on Australian soil

“Look, I’m going to shirt-front Mr Putin … you bet I am,” he said.

“I am going to be saying to Mr Putin (that) Australians were murdered. They were murdered by Russian-backed rebels using Russian-supplied equipment.”

In June, 2021, when the criminal trial began in the District Court of The Hague, the link to Russia was solid. Three Russians and a Ukrainian were indicted for causing the crash of flight MH17 and the murders of the 298 people on board – 38 of them from Australia. A verdict will finally be delivered late on Thursday night Australian time.

Igor Girkin, a former colonel of the Russian Federal Security Service, Sergey Dubinskiy and Oleg Pulatov, both former Russian special intelligence, and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian under the command of Dubinskiy are being prosecuted in absentia.

None of the four are able to be extradited to appear in court, but international arrest warrants have been issued and the men feature on Lists of Wanted Persons.

The court’s Public Prosecution Service has alleged they worked together to source and deploy a Buk missile system in order to shoot down a fighter plane.

Pulatov is the only defendant to recognise the trial, sending lawyers to defend him against charges of causing the crash and the murder of all those on board.

Prosecutors have asked for life sentences to be imposed, should the four men be convicted.

From September 6, through to early November, 2021, more than 100 relatives of the crash victims addressed the court.

Some travelled to be there. Some appeared via a live video link, or prerecorded themselves. Some brought photographs of their loved ones to display on a stand, for the judges to see as they spoke of their loss.

Dutch grandfather Jaap van Keulen couldn’t bring himself to read aloud the words he’d prepared to explain the loss of his family. His lawyer read it for him.

For 19 months, he said, he received 16 reports letting him know parts of his son and his son’s family had been identified after the recovery effort at the crash site.

“That means that the police, 16 times, tell you that your son, your daughter-in-law, and your two grandsons have been killed in the disaster because remnants of their bodies have been found,” he said through his lawyer.

“A total of 220 body parts were found. We still don’t know where the rest of their bodies (are) located. We have felt nothing but chaos. Rubble. Ruins. Disbelief. This couldn’t have happened.”

FAMILIES TORN BY HEARTACHE

There is a photo of Jack O’Brien and his mother, Meryn, taken on Mother’s Day, 2014, just a couple of weeks before he left on an overseas adventure. It’s a photo his family holds dear, a photo they described in detail to the court in The Hague.

Meryn is sitting on their back deck eating a cooked breakfast prepared by her daughter, Bronwyn. Jack, who had walked outside, leans in as Bronwyn snaps the photo. Mother and son are grinning.

It is a picture of love and joy.

“I wonder when I’ll ever see that look of sheer, undiluted happiness on Meryn’s face again,” Jack’s father, Jon, told the court.

Jon, Meryn and Bronwyn were among those who addressed the court. Heartfelt attempts to describe the indescribable – condensing life-changing loss and grief into a finite number of words.

“Jack, our son, was our first child,” Meryn said in a video message played in a court on the other side of the world. “We made him, I gave birth to him, I fed him.”

Jack, a fitness enthusiast who wanted to be a personal trainer, had saved money to fund a seven-week trip around Europe.

He’d boarded a plane in Amsterdam, on his way back to Australia, as his family slept at their home in Sydney. The following morning, a radio report told them Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had been shot out of the sky.

“His body, broken and burnt, then lay on the ground in a war zone,” Meryn said.

“I am distressed by images of him falling through the sky.

“I often contemplate that our deep love for Jack counted for nothing against the hatred and violence. How do I live now that violence has shattered our family?”

In a separate video message, Jon told the court his grief was so immense that he’d had thoughts of ending his life.

“But I do want to live, and I could not inflict even more pain on my family,” he said.

“I didn’t want to live in a world without Jack in it. I realise this is very self-focused, as if my suffering matters more than that of so many others across the world.

“But I discovered that is one of the results of intense grief – the world shrinks to a ball of misery with you at the centre and it becomes hard to see beyond that.”

Some time after Jack’s murder, his family received a small box – personal items collected from the crash site.

“It has been opened and then closed again,” Meryn said.

“The ordinary items inside are now precious yet carry such pain.”

On July 17, 2014, Bryan Clancy fell asleep listening to ABC news. A plane had been shot down over eastern Ukraine. A terrible situation that seemed far away.

It wasn’t until the next morning that he began to panic and, along with wife Lisa, searched frantically for the travel itinerary Bryan’s brother, Mick, had given them. Had they flown over Ukraine?

Mick and his wife, Carol, had been on their way home from a holiday, a celebration of his retirement.

The final entry of their itinerary read: “Home, sweet home.”

Bryan and Lisa looked for flights leaving Amsterdam bound for Kuala Lumpur. There’d been only one that day. Shock and disbelief. Frantic calls to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade weren’t able to confirm anything.

Despite this, they knew they had to go to Bryan and Mick’s elderly mother, Joy, and break the news.

It was, Lisa told the court, the worst day of her life.

“I will forever remember the look on Mick’s mother’s face as my husband and I had to inform her that we suspected Mick and Carol were on-board the plane,” she said in her victim impact statement.

“As we waited for Joy to answer the door, my thoughts were, ‘How on earth are we going to break this news to her?’.”

She’d opened the door with a smile on her face, saying: “Hello, Lisa! Why are you here?” “I wake up every morning and go to bed with that image in my mind every day,” Lisa said. “The sadness will never leave our family, most of all his mother.”

Bryan struggles to talk about his brother. He can’t find the words to describe their bond.

“None of my siblings, nor my mother, know that the fake funeral that we had for Mick was one with a full-sized coffin that held only a minor part of Mick’s upper left femur,” Bryan said, his anger in every word, as he read aloud his statement. “This has caused secrecy within the family.

“I want the perpetrators to be held accountable. I don’t want them executed, but I want the world to know what they have done and of the effect this act of terror has had on the families of the 298 victims of the downing of MH17.

“I have been robbed of a brother who was part of me and who was the gel that once bonded my family together. And now I have a family that has been fractured forever.”

INTO THE WAR ZONE

Hilda Sirec had been a police officer for about 15 years when MH17 was shot down. At the time, she was a sergeant who investigated people-smugglers. But, as a part-time bomb technician and experienced investigator, she was among those picked by Commander Brian McDonald to deploy to Kyiv.

“We would go there, engage with the Ukrainians, ask them for evidence and information to help us do some victim identification,” she said.

“Basically, there were people who called Australia home and we wanted to identify them and, if at all possible, bring them home.”

Sirec and a small team set up in a conference room at the InterContinental Kyiv hotel, but after only a matter of hours, the call came through that they could access the crime scene.

“Do you want to go in?” McDonald had asked. And Sirec thought, “Of course. That’s what we’re here to do”. “Then everything else was spelled out. You’re unarmed. It’s an active war zone. We don’t know how we’re going to get you in. And it was like, ‘Just make it happen’,” she said.

Anthony Fox went in first; Sirec the following day.

The drive from Kyiv to Donetsk is about 12 hours, and she and a civilian from the Australian Defence Force hired a driver to take them.

“So, we get in the car and we get to a checkpoint,” she said. “There’s people with guns everywhere and they demand our passports.”

The men with guns didn’t speak English, so Sirec tried to negotiate their way through in Slovenian.

“I’m trying to say ‘Policia! Policia! For the crash’ but they just didn’t really believe us,” she said.

Finally, a logo on an Australian Federal Police notebook convinced the guards to let them through. “I think, for them, it was a highly suspicious time,” Sirec said.

‘IT WAS STILL SMOULDERING’

They treated every day at the crash site as though it would be their last.

A shaky ceasefire had been negotiated and liaison staff from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe – the world’s largest security-based, United Nations-backed intergovernmental body – were on site to let them know if that failed. Sometimes it did – and they’d make a quick retreat.

Dutch authorities took the lead on the MH17 investigation, given 193 people on board had been from the Netherlands.

“The first site that we went to was what we called the engine crash site,” Sirec said.

“It was one huge sort of jet engine that was obliterated. You had all this molten steel that was starting to solidify again. And the burnt, scorched ground – it was just black everywhere. You had all these little fibres just floating around, the carbon fibre that was around the plane. And then peppered in among everything was little body parts like a finger, or a bit of bone, or a piece of jaw.”

As well, there were personal items – sunglasses, backpacks, passports, papers.

“And then in the far background you have a farmhouse that’s kind of just sitting there,” Sirec said.

“And you just think, this plane was breaking up in the air, raining down on to the ground over a large distance.

“It would have been like a meteor shower, and this house is just sitting there waiting to get peppered with something but it was completely missed.”

THE PROOF THIS WAS A MIDAIR MASSACRE

Each day, Sirec and Fox would visit different sites ­within the crash scene. At one, a small town that was little more than a cul-de-sac of houses, half a wing had fallen and landed in a tree canopy.

Outside of that town, they spent a few hours combing the roadside for evidence.

“I think it was maybe even the second day where I was able to find the fuselage piece,” Sirec said.

The chunk of twisted metal was laying on the grass, sitting up against a telegraph pole. It was peppered with holes.

“That was the one for me where I realised that all the anecdotal information about how the plane was brought down, (the fuselage) confirmed it for me,” she said.

The holes were bow-tie shaped. As a bomb-tech, Sirec knew the markings meant fragmentation pieces had punched through the plane from the outside. It was ­consistent with a Buk missile explosion. She and Fox would also find bow-tie fragmentation pieces that built an even stronger case for the Russian-made surface-to-air missile.

It was a breakthrough, very possibly the first evidence that MH17 had been shot down, found by two AFP officers equipped with little more than a camera and a few cotton swabs.

“I don’t know what information the Dutch were feeding into the joint command team that was in The Hague,” Sirec said, “but certainly from our conversations with the Dutch … we showed them these photos and they were very excited.”

DIFFICULT DECISIONS

The first of the bodies recovered from the crash site arrived at the Eindhoven air base in The Netherlands on July 23.

A Dutch air force C-130 Hercules, with 16 coffins inside, landed first, followed by a Royal Australian Air Force C-17, which held a further 24.

The formality of their arrival was a contrast to the indignity of their deaths. A military guard lined the tarmac while a lone bugler played the Last Post for the people who had fallen from the sky to land in a paddock in a war zone.

The Dutch King and Queen, Prime Minister and cabinet members watched as coffin after coffin emerged from the bowels of the big military aircraft. Relatives looked on from an area screened off for privacy.

As the 40 individual hearses drove from Eindhoven to a military base at Hilversum, they passed crowds of people lining streets and bridges, standing in solemn tribute.

More coffins would arrive in the following days, and, in all, more than 3000 body parts would be brought to the facility where they’d undergo a ­detailed forensic identification process.

This is where the AFP’s Dr Simon Walsh, followed by Dr Sarah Benson, would spend many weeks co-ordinating the forensic aspect of Australia’s Operation Bring Them Home.

“The crash happened on a Friday, Australian time. I reckon I left Australia either the Saturday night or the Sunday night,” Dr Walsh, recognised as the country’s leading disaster victim identification expert, said.

But first, on the Friday, he attended a meeting of the ­Interdepartmental Emergency Taskforce, organised by the Department of Foreign Affairs so areas of government could plan their response.

“I’ve been to many of these. Sarah has too,” Dr Walsh said.

“I’ve never been to (one) where there were more people. I think there were about 200 people in this particular meeting.

“But the really interesting thing was, there was no situational awareness.”

What this meant, he explained, was that the Australians had no eyes on the ground. No consular officials could report back with any intelligence because the crash had happened in a war zone. They had no idea what they’d be facing.

Dr Walsh was initially instructed to pack a bag for Ukraine but would go no further than The Netherlands after the Ukrainian government agreed to cede their ­investigational lead to the Dutch.

It was a highly unusual move but recognised the ­immense loss of that country – 193 victims had been from The Netherlands.

“We had lots of experience deploying to different parts of the world and I’d never seen anyone cede sovereignty,” Dr Walsh said.

“Typically a government wants to show they can do what needs to be done – even if that is with a lot of support. If you think of the Asian ­tsunami and how the Thai government and authorities took that responsibility – with great support from Australia – but ultimately it was their show.”

A team of Australian forensic scientists made their way to the Netherlands, while, around the world, work was being carried out around the clock to build up a DNA database with profiles for every victim.

“That’s one of the points that really jumps out to me, the 24/7 nature of the contribution of Australia to this particular operation,” AFP chief forensic scientist Dr Benson said.

“When we might have been sleeping for a few hours overnight … there’s a whole body of work that was happening (in Australia) to make sure that when we woke up, we had the information we needed.”

At the military base, scientists from each country worked with any technique at their disposal to identify each of the 3000 body parts. DNA profiling, dental and medical records. If a person had a pacemaker or pins in their knee, that information was catalogued.

It was a process that would take a year – and come with many emotional hurdles for the families.

Early on, Dr Walsh spoke with the relatives of the Australian victims to let them know what to expect. Every family had difficult decisions ahead of them.

“So, for example, we anticipated and did see, not surprisingly, a high level of fragmentation with respect to the human remains as a consequence of the incident,” Dr Walsh said.

“So that then presents a dilemma, if you like, for families – because we might identify their loved one, but it might be on the basis of a DNA result on a recovered human remain. And that might be only one part of their loved one.

“And then we needed the families to be prepared for the fact that they’d then have to think about what they want to do about repatriation because it could be that we repatriate their loved one and two weeks later, we recover something else that was also a body part of their loved one.”

Maybe, Dr Walsh explained, a family would decide to send their relative home where they’d be farewelled and a funeral held. What did they each want, if, after that, another body part was found?

“It’s not an easy truth but it had to be explained,” he said.

“Families were given the opportunity to consider whether they’d want to be notified about that or not.

“And in some circumstances, I think there were choices made that they didn’t.

“But they wanted to know what would happen – and there was a process for what would happen.

“And that was something that was across the whole operation because it applied to any individuals or countries involved.”

The scientists held a funeral for the remains that weren’t sent home. It was impossible to not be affected by the gravity of what they were doing.

For Dr Benson, who took over from Dr Walsh at the seven-week mark, that was never more clear than during her first day at the military base.

“One that struck me very early on was the first identification board I went to with Simon and I hadn’t visualised what it was going to be,” she said. “I was sort of shadowing Simon and we were doing our three-day handover and when we opened the file, I wasn’t prepared for what I was going to be confronted with – which was a young victim and the state of the remains.

“That hit home to me, right at that point in time.

“And then I went silent for three days as I listened to Simon, worked out how I was going to do this and focus on the common goal.”

NO LONGER WELCOME

Commander Brian McDonald knew there’d be a signal their time at the crash site was up. He’d been told as much by Sir Angus Houston, appointed by then prime minister Tony ­Abbott as special envoy for Australia’s response in Ukraine.

And then it came: a complete communication blackout.

McDonald was in Kharkiv but he had people in the field, still combing the enormous crime scene for evidence.

“Our people had left (the village of) Soledar, had travelled down to the crash site for the day to do their searching, and I lost comms with them,” he recalled. “The phone systems went out. I remember having a chat with Angus and we both said, ‘That’s it.’”

He remembers the fear. He’d sent people into a war zone, where shells fell in the distance and each day they worked under a tentative ceasefire. He wouldn’t have known if they needed help, if they’d been killed.

“My take on it was that our presence in the region was no longer welcome and someone with the ability to take out a phone system was sending us a message that it’s time for you to leave,” McDonald said. So that’s what they did.

DON’T … OR YOU’LL START WORLD WAR III

It had been a challenging mission for the then counter-terrorism commander. He, like everyone else, had seen footage of MH17 spread across the fields of Hrabove.

He’d been due to fly to ­Jordan that week but, on the Sunday night, answered a call to the news he’d now be leading the AFP’s response to the downing of MH17 – from ­London.

They put together a team of 10 and boarded a flight. The team would reinforce Hilda Sirec and Anthony Fox. At a stopover in the United Arab Emirates, his phone rang again.

“You are no longer going to London, you’re going to The Hague,” McDonald was told.

They got back on the plane and disembarked in London to another call.

“You’re no longer going to London, you’re going to Kyiv. We’ve got access,” the caller said.

They flew to Kyiv and hired a car to get to Donetsk, an 800km drive of checkpoints manned by men with guns and roads blown to ­oblivion.

In Dnipro, they met with officers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. OSCE would guide them the rest of the way, responsible for crossing checkpoints and negotiating the daily ceasefire agreements.

“The first thing I was taken by was the countryside, because it was beautiful country,” McDonald said.

“Heaps of sunflowers, heaps of farming. But as you start to get closer to the conflict zone, you start to get damaged roads.

“Donetsk itself was a bit of a ghost town. People had moved out. Badly damaged buildings. The roads around there, there was several that had been bombed and just didn’t exist.

“And road blocks. So it was a real sense of a very heavily controlled environment.”

WORKING IN A WAR ZONE

Their first attempt at reaching the crash site was aborted ­before they’d even made it out of the car park.

The ceasefire had not held, OSCE staffers told them.

They tried again, day after day.

One day, they arrived at a checkpoint close to the crash site.

“It was actually right in the conflict zone … the conflict point between the Russian separatists and the Ukrainian forces,” McDonald said.

The OSCE personnel got out to speak to the men at the checkpoint. Around them were Ukrainian soldiers in dugouts. Tanks on the horizon. Shells fell in the distance with low booms.

“They’re not relaxing, they’re not drinking tea,” he said of the Ukrainian soldiers.

“They’re focused on what’s in front of them.

“You certainly got a feeling you were in the middle of a war zone.”

Finally, the OSCE members returned with news.

“The advice was, it’s just not safe to move you from this point to the crash site,” ­McDonald said.

At the hotel one night, a Russian separatist commander arrived to speak to the OSCE. He wore normal clothes but came with heavily armed guards. They stood around holding automatic weapons.

“At one point I remember there was a very heavy explosion that felt like it wasn’t that far from our hotel,” McDonald said.

“We felt it, car alarms all around our hotel were going off. I jumped up and walked outside to see what it was.”

He began to believe they were being held in Donetsk deliberately, as human shields. It was clearly beneficial to someone to keep foreign representatives in the city to avoid certain areas being shelled.

Finally, negotiations stuck and the team was told they could enter the crash site – but only from the tiny village of Soledar to the north.

The drive took them most of the day. Then, finally, around 2pm, their fifth or sixth attempt, they arrived.

“We’re on a dirt road in a minibus. We came up over the top of a crest,” McDonald said.

“And here’s the wing of a plane sitting in a small dam. An enormous wing off a 777, almost in its totality, sitting in this dam. You’ve just never seen that before. It’s one of those things that sticks in your memory.

“We then went around the corner where most of the ­fuselage was and I remember we got out and we were walking through that. And that was … confronting.”

Personal items belonging to crash victims were everywhere. McDonald looked down and saw some paperwork. On it was the name of an Australian passenger.

They stayed in an old government building in the tiny village, locals cooking them meals of rice and dried fish.

They drove each day in an OSCE commercial bus, ­navigating broken bitumen and collapsed bridges replaced – terrifyingly – by narrow ­pylons.

The crash site was so enormous, McDonald compared it to the 1998 Lockerbie bombing. The investigation and ­recovery of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded when a bomb on board was detonated, took three years.

But they were in a war zone. They’d have a matter of days.

“We were operating over a really big area. We knew that we had a diminishing time frame,” McDonald said.

“So, we had a drone. It was far better to get it up, see where your priority sites are to search and all that sort of thing.”

It made sense. But word got back to Sir Angus Houston in Kyiv.

“He rang me in an absolute flurry and said, don’t put the drone up … there’s a very good chance you’re going to start, I seem to recall he said, World War III,” McDonald said. ­“Because obviously if we put the drone up, it would give us an advantage of seeing what was happening on the ground around us – which made me think that there were troop movements, there were ­people there that we couldn’t see.”

AFP officers ended up spending about two weeks at the crash site during the initial investigation before they got their silent message their time was up.

When their communication was cut, they packed up and took the bus out of there.

GOING OLD SCHOOL

THE wreckage of MH17 was driven into the Gilze-Rijen Air Base in the Netherlands in the backs of more than a dozen trucks.

Piece by piece, the felled plane was laid out on the floor across several hangars. Investigators would spend months reconstructing and analysing each item, using an arsenal of experience, skill and technology to determine what had happened.

Wayne Morrell, with 34 years in policing and 27 years in forensics, was Australia’s forensic lead on the ground at the air base.

“I’ve done a lot of offshore work, but I’ve never ever done anything like this,” he said.

“There’s no template. ­Nobody has investigated an aircraft that’s been shot out of the sky – potentially.

“And then to try to work out, well, what sort of evidence should we be able to gather to be able to show what happened?”

Morrell’s team worked alongside teams from other countries and with the Dutch Safety Board to investigate what had happened.

Every possible scenario had to be analysed. Was it a mechanical fault? Pilot error? Was it a missile?

As part of that, Morrell would lead teams of investigators into Ukrainian military facilities to deconstruct military weapons to use as reference materials.

Should they find foreign material among the wreckage, they could compare it to the deconstructed weapons to prove it came from a missile.

He said the front section of the aircraft had penetration marks consistent with something exploding next to it – including the “bow-tie” shapes discovered by Hilda Sirec.

“One of the examinations, or one of the techniques used, was to use magnets to pull out items that were magnetic,” Morrell said.

This worked because much of the aircraft frame was not magnetic. Anything that was, was a foreign body.

“The conclusion really was that there were a couple of items there that were found lodged in part of the aircraft frame that … are really consistent with elements found on these missiles,” he said.

“That piece of evidence is interesting … you’ve got this large incident, tragic incident, over a 50km square ­radius. You get all this information back – and then the bit that turns out to be probably a significant forensic outcome … relies on an old-school physical comparison.”

SOME FORM OF JUSTICE

Assistant Commissioner Peter Crozier would take on the role of executive lead of the AFP’s investigation into the downing of MH17.

It’s an investigation that ­remains ongoing, with around 500 officers deployed overseas in the years since the airliner was shot down.

He said it’s been years of sending unarmed law enforcement officers into a war zone, of hard work and dedication – all to one end.

“What’s absolutely fundamental to us is, we’ve never lost sight of the reason we’re doing this,” he said.

“And the focus for us has always been to bring some form of justice to those people who were killed (and) all those people who have been impacted and affected as a result.

“It’s all about those ­people.”

The MH17 Joint Investigation Team – comprising of law enforcement from The Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Ukraine and Belgium – has worked through enormous challenges.

The first step was the ­recovery of the victims. Returning people to their home country, to their families.

Then came the forensic ­investigation. The reconstruction of the plane. The technical work to prove a Buk missile brought down MH17. The running out of alternative scenarios. Was it possible a Ukrainian fighter jet shot the plane down?

“We’ve been able to dispel that,” Crozier said.

And lastly, the roles the four accused men played in firing a missile at a plane filled with holiday-makers.

“There’s a range of things that present challenges to us that mean we have to step out of that traditional way of thinking,” he said.

“What might be our options to potentially bring these people to justice?

“One of them is to just say, right, we are going to run this trial, we are going to run it in absentia, we are going to just go through that process and make sure that evidence goes before a form of tribunal, a form of prosecution, a form of court, so people can see what we believe actually ­happened.”

PURSUIT OF TRUTH

AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw was appointed to his position in 2019, long after MH17 but squarely within the investigation phase. Not long after he started in the job, he found an invoice requiring his approval – it was for a tank some of his people had hired to move them safely across Eastern Ukraine into the crash site.

“It was a lot. Like – a lot,” he said.

“We don’t muck around. If we’ve got to secure something to make it safer, we just do it.”

The MH17 investigation has affected everyone who worked on it, including the more than 500 staff deployed internationally.

“I think it’s a bit of an ­untold, unsung story … but we’re still seeking justice for those families and we won’t stop when it comes to that,” Kershaw said.

“As law enforcement ­officers, you pursue the truth. And that’s a relentless ­pursuit.

“And that’s what we’ve done in this case.

“If we can actually somehow reduce the ­suffering of the families by bringing the truth to the surface, then we’ve done our job.

“If we can bring them to justice, even better. And I think that they know that we’re not giving up – and we won’t until the job’s done.”