Dutch experts say Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 broke up in mid-air after being hit by “numerous objects” that “pierced the plane at high velocity”.

A report released by the Dutch Safety Board said there was “no evidence of technical or human error”. A BBC correspondent says this evidence is consistent with the plane being struck by shrapnel from a missile.

The plane was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in rebel-held territory eastern Ukraine in July. All 298 people on board, most of them from the Netherlands, died when the plane came down, amid reports it was shot down by pro-Russian rebels.

Dutch aviation investigators relied on information from the black box flight data recorders, air traffic control, satellite images and photos from the scene to compile the preliminary report.

The shortcut that the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 took before it was shot down over Ukraine reportedly saved the airlines 28,000 dollars at the cost of 298 lives.

According to News.com.au, the Transport Workers Union highlighted the figure and the data was used by National Secretary Tony Sheldon to seek international support and force air safety regulators to halt commercial flights passing over areas of conflict.

Sheldon said that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is the global safety watchdog with primary responsibility for issuing safety warnings on commercial routes.

He said that ICAO crisis talks after MH17 simply resulted in an agreement to meet again next year, adding that the ultimate decision on air routes is still being made by the airlines themselves and that means cost would always be calculated against risk.

Meanwhile, he also lauded Qantas’ recent decision to avoid flight paths over Iraq conflict zones. However, he asserted that while the move was caused due to public and union pressure, regulators and airlines should have taken the decision as a matter of safety and principle instead.

Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH17 with 298 people onboard was shot down on July 17 while flying over Ukraine.

The bodies of 20 Malaysian victims of Flight MH17 that crashed in Ukraine in July are due to arrive in Kuala Lumpur, as the nation holds a day of mourning.

A specially chartered plane took off from Amsterdam and is expected to land at about 10:00 local time (02:00 GMT).

National flags will be flying at half-mast across the country and a minute of silence will be observed.

Flight MH17 is believed to have been shot down by a missile fired by pro-Russian rebels. They deny the claim.

All 298 passengers and crew on board the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 died on 17 July.

At Kuala Lumpur airport, the plane from the Netherlands is expected to be met by senior Malaysian government officials.

The caskets will be unloaded and put in hearses by military personnel. The bodies will then be given to the victims’ relatives to be laid to rest.

This is the first time Malaysia is holding a national day of mourning for civilian victims.

The honour has traditionally been accorded only to the royal family and heads of government.

Of those on board Flight MH17, 43 were Malaysian nationals.

So far 28 Malaysian victims have been identified in the Netherlands, which is leading an international investigation into the crash in eastern Ukraine.

More than 200 coffins with remains of the victims have so far been taken to the Netherlands.

But the inquiry is being hampered by continuing fighting between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian rebels near the crash site.

-BBC

Mo, Evie and Otis Maslin and their grandfather Nick Norris were returning from a holiday in Amsterdam, where their parents remained, when their plane was shot down over Ukraine.

‘When their innocent bodies were blown from the sky, I stretched my arms as high as I could and screamed for them,’ their mother, Rin Norris, told the crowd of 1,000 at Perth’s Scotch College.

The mother of three, who was reduced to tears when remembering her children and father, was speaking publicly for the first time since her and husband Anthony released a statement about the ‘hell beyond hell’ they were living through following the crash.

“Now I see them only in my head. I can’t touch them, I can’t feel their warmth. I can imagine the memory of their bodies close to mine and the love in my heart will always be open for them. My arms will always be reaching for them.”

The father of the children, Anthony Maslin told service goers that his children had travelled to numerous countries around the world, cramming more into their short lives than most people do in their lifetimes.

He described his children, aged 12, 10 and 8, as ‘unblemished, innocent, perfect souls’.

A short video message from the three children to a long-time friend they were meant to meet during the holiday was screened at a service.

Security officials in Ukraine say the downed Malaysia Airlines jet in eastern Ukraine suffered an explosive loss of pressure after it was punctured by shrapnel from a missile.

They say the information came from the plane’s flight data recorders, which are being analysed by British experts.

However, it remains unclear who fired a missile, with pro-Russia rebels and Ukraine blaming each other.

Many of the 298 people killed on board flight MH17 were from the Netherlands.

Dutch investigators leading the inquiry into the crash have refused to comment on the Ukrainian claims.

Heavy fighting has prevented an international police force composed of Dutch and Australian officers from reaching the crash site for a second consecutive day.

Ukraine’s army said on Monday it had managed to capture two towns near the wreckage in its bid to win back territory from the hands of the rebels.

The international delegation was stopped in Shakhtarsk, a town some 20 miles (30km) away from the area where flight MH17 was brought down.

The town was reportedly struck by shelling, causing residents to flee in cars.

“We are sick and tired of being interrupted by gunfights, despite the fact that we have agreed that there should be a ceasefire,” said Alexander Hug, the deputy head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) team in Ukraine.

They had hoped to secure the site so that the wreckage and human remains can be examined by international crash experts. Most of the bodies have been removed, many of them repatriated to the Netherlands.

Ukrainian security spokesman Andrei Lysenko told reporters on Monday that the plane suffered “massive explosive decompression” after it was hit by fragments he said came from a missile.

Source: BBC

A Malaysian film star, who has roots in Sri Lanka, was on the ill-fated MH17 with her family.

Subhashini Jeyratnam, 38, an actress, dancer and TV star was onboard the flight along with her only daughter and Dutch husband.

Just two days before taking the flight she had celebrated her birthday in Amsterdam.

They had gone to Amsterdam to visit her husband’s family and show their 21-month-old baby girl, Kyla Maya Jey.

She was a resident of Kuala Lumpur.

An Air India plane flying less than 25 kilometres from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 when it was downed had tried to make contact with the pilots, a newspaper said Sunday.

The Times of India said Ukrainian air traffic controllers had asked the Air India pilots to try and establish contact with the Malaysia Airlines jet, which had stopped responding to its calls.

The Air India plane, which was flying from Delhi to Birmingham and was less than 25 kilometres (15.5 miles) from Malaysia MH17, received no response, according to the paper.

“The AI Dreamliner was less than 25km from the Malaysian aircraft when the latter was hit by a missile,” an unidentified airline source told the newspaper.

“When the pilots learned of the cause of the crash later, they were stunned.”

According to the newspaper, it is standard practice for air traffic controllers to ask pilots of aircraft in the vicinity to get in touch with pilots who have stopped responding.

The newspaper also said that minutes before the crash, the Air India pilots heard air traffic controllers give the Malaysian plane a “direct routing”.

This allows a plane to fly straight rather than tracking from one navigation point to another, and saves time and fuel.

An Air India spokesman declined to comment on the report.

The report comes despite a denial by India’s civil aviation ministry last week that the Air India plane was close to the Malaysian jet, which was cut down over Ukraine’s troubled eastern region on Thursday.

Ukraine accuses Moscow of helping pro-Russian rebels to shoot down the Malaysian plane, killing 298 people.

Video has emerged of rescue workers recovering what appears to be a black box flight recorder from the wreckage of MH17.

The footage recorded on Friday shows men wearing Ukrainian Emergency Ministry uniforms working in a wheat field in the village of Hrabove.

Walking away from emergency vehicles parked at a rural roadside, the men appear to conduct a co-ordinated search at the crash site.

One man is then seen walking across the field carrying an orange-coloured flight data recorder and handing it to a colleague.

Audio from another worker, who is not seen, can be heard saying “flight recorder”, in Russian.

The footage was released as separatist leader Aleksander Borodai said rebels were keeping what they presume are MH17′s black boxes in the eastern city of Donetsk, but would need experts to confirm that they were the plane’s flight recorders.

Borodai, self-styled prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, told a news conference: “Some items, presumably the black boxes, were found, and they have been delivered to Donetsk and they are under our control.

“There are no specialists among us who could pinpoint the look of the black boxes, but we brought to Donetsk some technical items which could be the black boxes of the airliner.”

Another rebel official, Sergei Kavtaradze, said he thought there were two of the presumed black boxes.

Two hundred Ninety Eight (298) people, including 10 Britons, died when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot out of the skies as it flew over eastern Ukraine on Thursday afternoon, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Ukraine’s Emergencies Ministry said this morning that 196 bodies have now been recovered, after concerns were raised yesterday over how they had been treated at the crash site.

Source: Mirror.uk

US Secretary of State John Kerry says there is overwhelming evidence of Russian complicity in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane in Ukraine.

Mr Kerry called on Russia to take responsibility for the actions of the rebels, saying their handling of the dead had been “grotesque”.

All 298 people on flight MH17 died when it was reportedly hit by a missile.

Russia has been accused of providing the rebels with an anti-aircraft system that was allegedly used in the attack.

Earlier, the remains of up to 196 people were loaded on to refrigerated rail wagons in eastern Ukraine, to be taken to an unknown destination.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has called on pro-Russian separatists not to use the bodies as pawns in their conflict with the Ukrainian authorities.

“There are 298 bodies on that site – their families, their loved ones want them home now,” she said.

Mr Kerry said the US had seen major military supplies moving into Ukraine from Russia in the last month, including a convoy of armoured personnel carriers, tanks and rocket launchers.

Intercepted calls suggested a Russian SA-11 missile system had been transferred to the rebels, Mr Kerry said, and the US had seen a video of a launcher being moved back into Russia after flight MH17 crashed.

“There’s [an] enormous amount of evidence that points to the involvement of Russia in providing these systems, training the people on them,” Mr Kerry said on a US TV network.

He also threatened further sanctions on Russia and called on European allies to get tougher with President Putin after the “wake-up call”.

Source: BBC

Pro-Russia separatists are keeping the remains of 192 of those MH17 victims in refrigerated cars on a train, Groysman said, adding that talks are ongoing for their release.

Meanwhile confusion is still rife over the state of the investigation into the crash of the downed plane, which killed all 298 people on board.

The State Emergency Service said the search in the remote area of eastern Ukraine, roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border, was being "complicated by armed separatists at the site who hinder the work of SES units."

It said that 380 official staff members are taking part in the search for the remains of the MH17 victims, covering an area stretching across 34 square kilometers (13 square miles).

They were being helped by busloads of volunteers from local coal mines who fanned out across the wheat fields where the bodies and debris from the plane fell to earth Thursday.

The situation at the crash site showed some small signs of improvement, with more control and more activity. But it was still far from a well-organized investigation scene, and the area was still under the control of pro-Russia rebels.

Many of the bodies that had littered the fields previously were gone by late morning Sunday as CNN teams observed the crash site, but it was not immediately clear where they had been taken.

Government emergency workers prevented vehicles from driving up the road to the main crash site, but people could still roam around the fields on foot.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN's "State of the Union with Candy Crowley" that there were reports Sunday of "drunken separatists piling the remains of people into trucks in an unceremonious fashion."

He said he spoke Saturday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in what he called a "direct and tough conversation."

Russia needs to help ensure that investigators can conduct a thorough investigation, he said.

Bodies on train cars

Large numbers of bodies have been collected on refrigerated train cars at a station near the crash site, international observers told CNN.

The observers, from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said they have been told the bodies are from the crashed plane but they can't independently confirm that.

The 14-member OSCE team said the train will remain in place until international specialists arrive. It was not clear when that would be or where the train might take the bodies.

It's hard to get reliable information at the scene because several groups of pro-Russian rebels, some of them masked, control the checkpoints leading to the crash site.

"There doesn't seem to be one commander in charge," Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the OSCE observers, told CNN on Saturday.

Rebels are suspected of shooting down the plane with a Russian-made surface-to-air missile.

Three air crash investigators from Ukraine accompanied the OSCE observers on Saturday but didn't have much time to do their work, Bociurkiw said. "They need a lot more time and a lot more freedom of access," he said.

Where are the 'black boxes'?

The Reuters news agency distributed video on Sunday of what appeared to be an inflight recorder found by rescue workers in a field in eastern Ukraine. The agency labeled the video as being of one of the two flight data recorders from MH17.

The Ukrainian government said Friday -- the same day the Reuters video was shot -- that the so-called black boxes are still in Ukrainian territory but didn't clarify whether they were in Ukraine's possession.

Bociurkiw said then that no one at the crash site was able to tell his people where the recorders might be.

Malaysian investigators flew to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, on Saturday. But Malaysia's official news agency Bernama said they were still negotiating with pro-Russian rebels over access for their 131-member team.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said Saturday in Kuala Lumpur that Malaysia was "deeply concerned that the crash site has not yet been properly secured."

"There are indications that vital evidence has not been preserved in place," he said.

Law enforcement officials from the Netherlands, the United States and Australia have arrived or are being sent to Ukraine to work with the investigation, which is being led by the Ukrainian government in Kiev.

Malaysia Airlines said Sunday that it will retire the flight number MH17 for the route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, replacing it with the code MH19.

Families' agonizing wait

For the families of the victims, the confusion at the scene of the crash deepens the suffering.

Silene Fredriks said her son and his girlfriend had taken Flight MH17 for a planned vacation in Bali. At Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Sunday, she laid flowers and signed the condolence book.

She says she wants Russian President Vladimir Putin to ensure that the two young people's remains make it back to the Netherlands.

"Mr. Putin must take care of my son and my daughter to bring them home," she said. "I can do nothing but wait for their bodies."

The lack of clear information about what's happened to the victims is "horrible," she said: "It's one bad movie."

Pressure on Putin

Governments from around the world have expressed outrage at the disorderly situation at the crash site and called on Putin to use his influence on the pro-Russian rebels.

"There are multiple reports of bodies being removed, parts of the plane and other debris being hauled away, and potential evidence tampered with," the U.S. State Department said in a statement. "This is unacceptable and an affront to all those who lost loved ones and to the dignity the victims deserve."

British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote a Sunday Times opinion article urging Putin to find a way to make the crash site more accessible and calm the strife between Ukraine and the rebels.

"If President Putin does not change his approach to Ukraine, then Europe and the West must fundamentally change our approach to Russia," Cameron wrote. Ten of the passengers on MH17, which was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, were British.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country had 27 citizens on the plane, added to the pressure on Putin.

Describing the downing of the passenger jet as "a horrific crime," Abbott said he had summoned Russian Trade Minister Denis Manturov, who is visiting Australia, and "made crystal clear my concerns and dissatisfaction with the way this has been handled."

"Russian-controlled territory, Russian-backed rebels, quite likely a Russian-supplied weapon," Abbott said in a television interview Sunday. "Russia can't wash its hands of this."

'Intensive' conversation

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte have spoken out, as well.

"I want to see results in the form of unhindered access and a speedy recovery of the victims' remains," Rutte said Saturday. Nearly two-thirds of the people on the jetliner were Dutch.

Rutte told reporters he had "an extremely intensive telephone conversation" with Putin on Saturday in which he told the Russian leader that "the window of opportunity to show the world that he intends to help is closing rapidly."

The United States has said evidence suggests a Russian-made surface-to-air missile fired from the rebel territory took down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with citizens from more than 10 nations aboard.

"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists," Kerry told CNN on Sunday.

U.S. officials believe the missile systems may have been moved back across the border into Russia, CNN foreign affairs reporter Elise Labott said Saturday.

Russia has denied any involvement, and Putin said Ukraine's military campaign against the rebels was to blame. He also has called for a "thorough and objective investigation" of the crash.

Finger-pointing

Since the crash, the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian rebels have traded bitter accusations over who was responsible and what has been done since.

Ukrainian officials have said that a Russian-made Buk M1 missile system, brought into eastern Ukraine from Russia, had shot down the Malaysian airliner.

The Ukrainian government has accused the rebels of removing debris and 38 bodies from the scene as part of an attempt to cover up what happened.

The local head of the rebels, Alexander Borodai, has rejected accusations that his forces shot down the plane, telling reporters that the rebels lacked the firepower to hit an aircraft that high.

Borodai, who calls himself the prime minister of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic, also denied that his forces removed any bodies.

Ukraine’s security services produced what they said were two intercepted telephone conversations that they said showed rebels were responsible for downing a Malaysian airliner.

In the first call, the security services said, rebel commander Igor Bezler tells a Russian military intelligence officer that rebel forces shot down a plane Thursday.

In the second, two rebel fighters – one of them at the scene of the crash – say the rocket attack was carried out by a unit of insurgents about 25 kilometers (15 miles) north of the crash site. Neither recording could be independently verified.

One of the fighters, who states he is at the site of where the plane came to the ground, describes seeing scattered debris. He later describes finding the documents of somebody he identifies as an Indonesian national studying at “Thompson University.”

A rebel is also heard asking, “Any weapons there?”, to which another replies, “None at all. Civilian things, medical stuff, towels, toilet paper.”

Following is a video from the Ukrainian security service website that shows the conversation between rebel fighters:

The downing of a Malaysia ­Airlines jet over Ukraine has led to speculation that the same carrier’s missing flight MH370 may also have been blown out of the sky by a missile.

The missing airliner with 239 passengers and crew aboard was travelling from Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to Beijing on March 8 when it lost contact with air traffic control.

No trace of it has been found since despite a huge search involving ships from a host of nations including the UK, which sent HMS Echo.

Malaysia Airlines was heavily criticised for its handling of the aftermath of the crash when distraught relatives were deliberately kept in the dark over developments during the frantic initial search.

An explosive book, Flight MH370: The Mystery, made the sensational claim that MH370 was accidentally shot down by US or Thai strike fighters as part of a training drill that went horribly wrong.

Written by British author Nigel Cawthorne, it puts forward the theory that the exercise was to involve mock warfare on land, water and in the air using live ammunition. One passage reads: “Say a participant accidentally shot down Flight MH370. Such things do happen. No one wants another Lockerbie, so those involved would have every reason to keep quiet about it.”

New Zealand oil rig worker Mike McKay has also suggested the plane was shot down shortly after it stopped communicating with air traffic controllers. He claims to have seen a burning plane crashing in the Gulf of Thailand.

Meanwhile conspiracy theorists have suggested the plane landed secretly at a US military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Others maintain it was hijacked to Afghanistan.

Experts, however, are convinced the passengers and crew are most likely to have died from suffocation after a pressurisation failure while the aircraft flew on automatic pilot before crashing when it ran out of fuel.

The Australian Navy’s ship Ocean Shield, which carries a robot submarine, is continuing to scour the ocean floor for the plane’s black box which could reveal exactly what happened.

-Express UK