Grisly task begins for crash investigators

A FULL team of 60 international investigators — including 38 Australian Federal Police — has successfully reached the Malaysia Airlines crash site.

A FULL team of 60 international ­investigators — including 40 Australian Federal Police — has begun searching for human ­remains after forging a treacherous path through a war zone to reach the Malaysia Airlines crash site.

Persistence is paying off for the investigators, who paused for a minute’s silence at the area known as the chicken shed, close to the centre of the wreckage.

The team said it felt safe for now, but volleys of missiles could be heard thumping in the distance.

“It is not landing here so it is OK,” said AFP commander Brian McDonald. “We’ve got a job to do.”

Operation Bring Them Home has begun, although Commander McDonald — who describes the whole area as a crime scene — did not want to put a time on how long the work would take.

There is wreckage strewn across eight kilometres and there are no assurances that the site, which is a major battlefront, is safe.

“There’s a lot of grief attached to this place,” said the Dutch tactical commander, Kees Kuijs, soon after arriving on the mission to salvage human remains and return them to their families.

He called the place where 298 people died after MH17 was hit with a surface-to-air missile a “field of remembrance”.

The team arrived at the disaster scene with prepared search grid patterns and AFP officers headed almost straight on to the site looking for any remains of 80 people still unaccounted for.

Negotiators from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were at the head of the convoy followed by the Australians in a large red bus.

The team needed to take a circuitous route through tense rebel checkpoints and enter Ukrainian ground where soldiers are amassed with tanks and cannon, and again back to the rebel-held crash site.

Along the way is an abandoned bus with its hazard lights still flashing and emblazoned with a sign saying “children”.

Fields are burning and villages hanging rank with smoke.

Commander McDonald said the security situation would need to be assessed each morning before heading to the site, as its tries to win guarantees from the warring Ukrainian army and rebels that the recovery workers would not be fired upon.

There has been no attempt to stop the convoy but it is in the middle of Europe’s first war in 15 years.

The teams will use all available forensic techniques, which include satellite observation, drones and sniffer dogs to find remains.

The AFP officers were granted permission by the Ukraine parliament to carry arms in the country, but Commander McDonald said he wanted them to be seen as a contingency and all efforts would be made not to display them.

The only weapons visible at the site were in the hands of the rebels.

“We need to understand we are in a conflict area,” said Commander McDonald. “It is really important to note that while I am here in a police uniform, this is a humanitarian undertaking. This is about the recovery of human remains and trying to give some closure to those poor people who lost people through this really tragic event.”

The crash site is only 85km from Donetsk where the foreign team is based, but it took the painstaking journey of 200km to avoid the open warfare.