Toys and letters to Queensland: Why the MH17 crash site still haunts me

The MH17 crash site looked like a war zone — and there were items that left Charles Miranda stunned when he arrived. WARNING: Graphic

It looked like a war zone. Burning debris scattered near a rural village in remote Eastern Ukraine after flight MH17 was shot from the sky.

At first, News Corp’s former European Correspondent Charles Miranda was unsure at what he was looking at.

The Malaysian Airlines flight was scheduled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down by a Russian made BUK surface-to-air missile fired from an area controlled by pro-Moscow Ukrainian rebels. 27 Australian passengers lost their lives.

Miranda had arrived at the remote site where the cockpit landed, approximately 700m from the rural Ukrainian village of Hrabove, before officials had.

And then he saw the teddy bears. And bags of mail with letters addressed to people in Toowoomba and Townsville in Queensland.

“There was all this burning, there was still flames which I thought was unusual. I thought what is this?” Miranda said

“It didn’t look like anything. It looked like a mass of nothing, but everything. And I think the first indication that it was actually part of MH17 was I started seeing a couple of teddy bears. “And for all intents and purposes, they were new, you know, there was nothing wrong with them. They weren’t damaged,” Miranda recalled.

A piece of wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is pictured on July 18, 2014 in Shaktarsk, the day after it crashed. Picture: AFP

“There was soft toys, and they were just sitting there, which was unusual. And then once you got your headspace into that space, you suddenly realise: ‘Okay, actually, I can make out seats. It sounds weird, but all of a sudden you can make out rows, all of a sudden you can make out a cockpit, amongst the mangled massive of steel and aluminium and materials’.”

“One of the first things I came across was a plastic sack of mail, which I looked at in the first letters there were for Toowoomba, there were letters for Townsville, Toowoomba,” Miranda said.

“I don’t know why it was all Queensland but there seem to be a lot of Queensland letters in this sack …

Photos and laptops found at scene of the crash site of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, become makeshift memorials. Picture: Supplied

“But it was the cockpit seat I think which was most distinctive, and I went up close to it. And there were, I guess, human remains there. And very much nearby was a passport which I picked up.

I googled the name and the passport because it looked official, and it was the co-pilot. It was the copilot’s passport!

“It was at that stage I rang a mate of mine who was in the AFP [Australian Federal Police] back in Canberra and I said, ‘mate, I’m here. I’m at the cockpit of MH17. There is no one here. (There was one farmer.)

Photos and laptops found at scene become makeshift memorials. Picture: Supplied

“‘There’s no one here. There’s no media. There’s no Russian-backed rebels. There was nobody. What do I do? And they said: ‘well it’s a crime scene just step away.’

“I’m like: ‘you have no idea there is everything here. And the rains are about to open up.’

“It was about to pour with rain. It was a surreal scene. And we’re just there by ourselves, with the heavens about to open up, and all this evidence is going to be rained on and no one else around. We were quite stunned as to what to do.”

Recovered personal items from MH17 Plane Crash site. Some of the items included two Dutch passports, a Samsung tablet and two wallets containing bank cards and identification. Picture: Supplied

International investigations revealed the crash resulted from the actions of Russian separatists who mistakenly thought they were firing at a Ukrainian warplane.

Russia has denied any involvement, instead suggesting Ukraine was responsible.

Miranda was directed to document what he saw, taking photos on his phone and with the help of his photographer, working quickly and causing as minimal disruption to the site as possible. The very real danger of approaching hostile militia made being in the area life-threatening.

Recovered personal items from MH17 plane crash site. Picture: Supplied

“We were effectively walking in an area where clearly they were deceased people in various forms. You know, these people were alive a few days earlier, and presumably looking for a holiday or returning home or whatever else it was, and that is quite upsetting. But I guess having that evidentiary gathering role, made us a bit more immune to that.

“We were there to do a job, it wasn’t just to report on it. I could see from a distance what we had to report on but having this other request to document what we were seeing gave us a bit of purpose,” Miranda said.

Flowers and plush toys are left at the site of the crash of a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in Grabove, in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, on July 19, 2014. Picture: AFP

“We were there a few hours, I think it would have been within two hours that others started turning up. And then probably after that two hours, the militia troops started turning up.”

Miranda recalls hordes of men in white coverall suits arriving, and silently deconstructing the crime scene. Lifting up chunks of plane, seats, passengers’ personal affects, body parts, and packing them into the back of a truck.

“What I didn’t want then was for them to ask to see my phone and see what else we had. So we left quite soon after knowing that everything that we had recorded and documented in such finite detail, would never be seen again, because it didn’t exist anymore. By the time everyone turned up. So we beat a hasty retreat at that stage,” he said.

Seven years after the tragedy, victims’ families are still waiting for those responsible to be held accountable.

The Netherlands – which had the majority of 193 fatalities in the MH17 crash – is working with Malaysia, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine to conduct the international criminal investigation of the cause of the crash of flight MH17 and those thought to be responsible.

Dutch Prosecutors are prosecuting four suspects, Russian nationals Oleg Pulatov, Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky, and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko, who are all being tried in absentia for murder. Only Pulatov has legal representation.

Australian families who lost loved ones have expressed their ongoing grief, in testimony given during emotional witness impact statements heard in Amsterdam court last month.

While proceedings are ongoing, head judge Hendrik Steenhuis set 22 September 2022 as a possible date for the verdict but gave alternative dates in November and December of that year.

For Miranda, the gravitas of documenting and reporting on the tragedy was not lost on him.

“There is an element of sorrow that you’re reflecting on while you’re doing that job, that someone is reading your content, somewhere in the world, online or wherever [and for some there’s a] personal attachment, it’s their loved one that you’re reporting on.

“I know quite early on I was starting to get calls, redirected, and texts and emails and they had these personal stories. [They were asking me]: ‘Can you do this? Can you find that? Do you know what happened to this part or that person?’

“And that’s kind of hard because it’s like: ‘These are people these are people who have loved ones and family who want to know that information. And you can’t necessarily provide it’.”

To see more interviews from the coalface of crime reporting visit True Crime with Amelia Saw on YouTube

Originally published as Toys and letters to Queensland: Why the MH17 crash site still haunts me