The grimmest journey for MH17 victims

Published by The Daily Mail (21st July, 2014)




The bodies had been lying spread out in the fields for two days in the summer heat, before being removed from a large swathe of the crash site yesterday. Workers from local mines were bussed in to clear the corpses. Once the bodies had gone, only bloodstained military stretchers were left along the side of the road.

Controversy is now raging over not only the conditions in which the corpses are being kept, but also fears that vital evidence of exactly what caused the tragedy is being lost. It risks becoming a gruesome tussle over the dead.


The bodies, each inside individual body bags, were last night still on the stationary train at Torez station nine miles from the crash site. Ukrainian officials in the city of Kharkiv, about four hours’ drive away, said there had been an agreement with rebel leaders for the bodies to next be taken there so they could be visited by grieving families. But there was last night no sign of that happening.


Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, meanwhile, told a news conference 192 bodies and eight fragments of bodies had been placed in the train. But he said the local rebels had yet to give permission for the train to set off.




Mr Groysman denied Kiev had put up barriers to the investigators.

In the city of Kharkiv, where the bodies were due to be taken, local government officer Natalia Yakovleva said they had been expecting the remains since Saturday. The town had prepared a special refrigerated warehouse to receive the bodies and had 312 hotel rooms on standby for relatives.


Related Posts

Categorised in: , ,