Removal of wreckage from tragic MH17 crash site begins in eastern Ukraine

WORK to remove the wreckage of MH17 from eastern Ukraine began yesterday, months after it was apparently shot down by Russian-backed rebels.

Work begins on the MH17 crash siteGETTY

Work begins on the site of the tragic MH17 plane crash

The Malaysian Airlines jet was shot down on July 17 while flying over Ukraine on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. 

All 298 passengers and crew on board were killed.

Following months of delays workers were seen cutting up parts of the plane and using cranes to load them into lorries.

The work is expected to last 10 days.

The crash area is large, so we do not intend to recover all the wreckage

Wim van der Weegen, Dutch Safety Board

The charred wreckage of the Boeing 777 is scattered over eight square miles and until now access has been limited by the rebels and by ongoing fighting in the region.

But the Dutch Safety Board has commissioned state emergency service personnel to collect parts of the wreckage from the crash site.

“The crash area is large, so we do not intend to recover all the wreckage,” said Safety Board spokesman Wim van der Weegen. 

“We’ve got a specific number of items we would like to recover.”

The first batch of plane debris left the crash site yesterday (SUN) morning and was due to be placed onto cargo trains bound for to the government-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Alexander Kostrubitsky, the emergency services chief in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said that more human remains had been discovered under the wreckage.

Eventually the air safety inspectorate plans to rebuild parts of the airliner in the Netherlands to try and learn more about what caused it to crash.

Ukraine and the West have blamed the downing of the MH17 flight on Russia-backed separatists using a ground-to-air missile.

But on Friday Russian state television released a satellite photograph it claims shows that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down the plane. 

The U.S. government dismissed the report as preposterous and online commentators called the photo a crude fake.

MH17 wreckage removal starts in rebel-held east Ukraine

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