Harriet Salem ‏@HarrietSalem 5 min.
Up to 98 bodies could still be at #MH17 'no man's land' crash site in war torn east #Ukraine https://news.vice.com/article/up-to-98-bodies-could-still-be-at-mh17-no-mans-land-crash-site
Caution: if you follow the link, there is a graphic picture at the end of the report!
Harriet Salem:
Ukrainian officials and Malaysian Airlines had previously stated that 282 bagged bodies were on board the train that left rebel-held Donetsk for the Ukrainian held city Kharkiv in the early hours of Tuesday morning. But upon arrival at its destination later in the day Jan Tuinder, head of the international team of forensic experts, admitted that they believed the carriages might only contained the remains of 200 people.
A confirmed figure of the number of bodies will not be known until all the gathered remains have been transported to the Netherlands where the body bags will be opened, Tuinder said.
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On their first attempt to visit the scene of the crash officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE] were forced to beat
a hasty retreat after a rebel gunman going by the name of Commander Grumpy grabbed a childrens stuffed toy monkey and told press to show the world that the Ukrainian government is killing kids, before warning journalists and officials to "get away from here" and firing a warning shot in the air.
.......
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Peter Van Vliet, one of three Dutch forensic experts who have managed to reach rebel-held Donetsk, described the journey as a logistical nightmare of being transferred in darkness between escorts from the two warring sides.
With no specialized recovery team able to reach the scene in time, the job of locating and removing bodies fell to an ad hoc team of local emergency service workers, including firefighters, medics, and policemen, joined up with a groups of volunteer miners to comb through the site.
Many seemed overwhelmed with the enormity of the gruesome task.
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The Monkey-man is back again! First he was bad, then he appeared in a video as the good guy who dutifully showed the monkey to the press and made the sign of the cross, and now, in translation, he's back to bad and worse. And
providing security.