New flight with remains of MH17 victims arrives in Netherlands

A Dutch military transport aircraft with human remains of victims of the MH17 flight disaster landed at Eindhoven Air Base in the Netherlands on Saturday.

Last Thursday Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg announced that the Dutch MH17 repatriation mission in eastern Ukraine has been finished in its current form. This means Saturday's flight was probably the last flight with human remains to the Netherlands, although locals in eastern Ukraine might still find new human remains.

The plane with seven coffins had left from the airport of Kharkiv and arrived around 4 p.m. in Eindhoven. At the airbase Dutch Minister of Security and Justice Ard van der Steur and over 300 relatives were present for a ceremonial tribute, which was the same as the previous times.

After the ceremony the coffins left in a cortege for transportation to the Corporal Oudheusden Barracks in Hilversum, where the identification will take place. The coffins arrived in Hilversum in the evening.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17 last year on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board died, of which 296 have been identified yet.

"The work of this mission is over," said mission leader Aalbersberg at a press conference last Thursday. "We cannot guarantee that everything has been found, but we have the certainty that we have done everything possible."

In the past two weeks the Dutch repatriation team recovered the new human remains, which were transported to the Netherlands on Saturday. Mission leader Aalbersberg hopes the last two victims will be identified with the new human remains.

The previous flights with human remains this year arrived on Feb. 7 and March 28. In the week after the crash four larger transports took place, on July 23, 24, 25 and 26, with a total of eight planes, followed by transports on Aug. 4, Nov. 8 and Nov. 28. Endit