It was early afternoon when the locomotive emerged from a gap in dense greenery hauling four decrepit refrigerated wagons, their door edges oozing globs of foam insulation that served as a makeshift seal. The clanking Soviet-built windowless locomotive with its grey refrigerated wagons came to a halt in the grounds of a dismal weapons factory, where the bodies were to be unloaded. The remains of the victims of the crash of Malaysia Airways Flight MH17 were being delivered to a disaster response team in Kharkiv.
Flying out of Canberra on 18 July, Australian forensic investigator Rod Anderson had first gone to Kiev. When news of the train of the dead came through, Anderson travelled on to Kharkiv and was assigned the job of taking control of the refrigerated train when it arrived and helping unload the bodies. Under Anderson’s supervision, a team entered the wagons and carried the bags to the platform, where their formal documentation began.
In the absence of names, each bag was given a number and an evidence tag, which Anderson had fashioned from lengths of a specialist tape that police customarily use to ensure parcels of evidence are tamper-proof. It was the start of a huge assignment, and Anderson knew that this was the easy part. The hard part of the job was yet to come: identifying the bodies and body parts would take place in the Netherlands.
Days later Anderson was one of a small group of investigators who actually got to walk around the MH17 crash site, sent to search for remains that had been overlooked. He wasn’t a foreigner at the gates of hell and he had previously been a witness to many a disturbing scene, but it was when he wandered through the crash site and came across the dead dogs that he was stopped in his tracks. They had been travelling in the live-cargo section of the plane and, although Anderson was there for the dead humans, the animals among the pile of suitcases and clothes suddenly brought home to him that ‘it was not just people. It was everything about life; the victims lived lives, they had pets.’
In Kharkiv, international forensic investigators supervised the transfer to a Dutch transport aircraft for a flight to Eindhoven the following day. A Dutch military plane, a C-130 Hercules, was standing at Kharkiv airport ready to take the remains back to the Netherlands. There they would not just be identified but finally returned to their families. The heart-wrenching odyssey of these passengers, whose lives had begun in dozens of different countries and had tragically ended in an eastern Ukrainian sunflower field, would soon be ending.
Speaking before the UN Security Council in New York, Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans told members that bringing the victims’ remains home was his country’s top priority. ‘To my dying day, I will not understand why it took so much time for the rescue workers to be allowed to do their difficult jobs, and that human remains should be used in a political game.’
Confusion remained as to the number of dead actually recovered from the crash site. It was impossible for the forensic team to determine how many remains had been loaded onto the train. The only limited access that investigators continued to be allowed to the crash site made it quite possible and probable that many body parts were still out there in the open.
On Sunday 20 July, the US claimed there was ‘powerful’ evidence that the rebels had shot down the plane with a Russian surface-to-air missile. They accompanied this accusation with video of a rocket launcher being driven away from the likely launch site with one surface-to-air missile missing. Phone calls from the separatists claiming credit for the missile strike had also been intercepted, but the only problem was that no one on the ground had reported seeing a Buk being fired. There were no photos, no videos of the actual flight path of the rocket, nothing. The launch of a Buk would leave an unmistakable long-lasting trail in its wake. No farmer, no miner, no peasant wife had reported seeing that trail; no one had presented any visual proof of a Buk being launched that day.
In an effort to have the US prove this accusation, Moscow asked the US to share any satellite images they had of the Buk launch. Russian officials denied that separatists had launched a Buk. They claimed they had evidence a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet had flown ‘between 3 to 5 kilometres’ from the Malaysia Airlines jet. It was this Ukrainian plane that had targeted the MH17 and shot it down, they declared. As early as May 2014 separatist fighters had accused Ukrainian Air Force jets of ‘hiding’ behind commercial airliners to avoid becoming a target.
The investigation into the cause of the crash was being led by the Dutch Safety Board. It had now ruled out most of the other possible causes of the crash and was becoming ever more convinced that the plane had been downed by some kind of surface-to-air missile. The plane had an excellent maintenance record. The feedback they were getting from the black boxes indicated that whatever had happened to the aircraft had been an extremely sudden event. The plane had flown around a thunderstorm and was flying in calm weather when it was hit, so it wasn’t likely that it had been struck by any form of lightning. There was no meteor activity recorded that day, so that option had also been dismissed.
But the Dutch Safety Board had still not been able to inspect the actual crash site and were still stuck in Kiev, waiting for clearance to visit the area. Although a number of international forensic experts had been allowed access to the site for a short period of time to look for remains, the DSB team, which was to determine the cause of the crash, was almost losing hope that it would ever be granted access. The main objective of these team members was to locate and salvage the wreckage so they would need to gain access for lengthy and consecutive periods. They could only hope that by the time they set foot on the crash site there would still be vital pieces of wreckage left to salvage.
Chapter 18
Bringing them home
After days of international disgust at the callous and casual treatment of the bodies by balaclava-wearing militia, the victims were given the dignity they deserved the following afternoon when they were transferred into simple but proper coffins for their flights to the Netherlands. ‘Operation Bring Them Home’ had begun.
This was the name the Australian government had given to the mission to repatriate the bodies of those killed in the tragedy, and other countries mourning their own MH17 victims had adopted the name. Australian government personnel had been deployed to Ukraine and the Netherlands as part of the operation and it would also help in repatriating the remains to the Netherlands for further identification.
In the early morning hours of 23 July at Eindhoven Air Base, the Globemaster crew prepared their aircraft for the solemn and significant task of bringing the first coffins home. The Royal Australian Air Force had flown its C-17A Globemaster aircraft to the Netherlands. From there it would fly to Kharkiv to pick up a number of coffins and bring them back to Eindhoven.
It was an unusually bright and sunny morning as the Globemaster’s wheels skidded along the runway before it took to the air at 7.50am. A Dutch C-130 Hercules had flown to Kharkiv a day after the crash to be on standby, ready to transport the bodies home when they arrived. But this crew and aircraft had been waiting for days on the hot tarmac as hold-up followed hold-up.
The moment the Globemaster lifted its wheels from the tarmac in Eindhoven, forty hearses turned onto the military airport’s runway. Parking in an impressive row, they would later that day carry a coffin each.
Eindhoven is a combined civil and military airport with a lot of general aviation as well, the second largest airport in the Netherlands. Eindhoven Air Base is the home base of all the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s transport aircraft. Their most important task is the provision of air transport for worldwide military operations, humanitarian missions and special assignments. In addition, air force personnel are tasked with airport duties at Eindhoven airport day and night.