Shot Down by Marianne van Velzen

Author:Marianne van Velzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

In Australia, the Netherlands, Malaysia and Ukraine, flags were flying at half-mast as the victims were mourned. Prime Minister Tony Abbott instructed all government establishments in Australia and overseas to fly Australia’s flag at half-mast as a symbol of respect.

Malaysia Airlines informed close relatives of those who died on Flight MH17 that they would be offered the opportunity to visit the crash site in eastern Ukraine. A number of relatives expressed their emotional need to visit the site where their loved ones had died, but most of them had no idea how remote and dangerous the crash site was. By car it was more than seven hundred kilometres from Kiev. It would take seven to eight hours to get there, travelling through extremely difficult terrain; upon arrival they would most likely find themselves in the middle of a war. The area was off-limits even for the authorities and investigators who had flocked to Ukraine. It was much too dangerous, so the prospect of large groups of civilians travelling to the area anytime soon seemed unlikely.

Jerzy and Angela, the parents of Perth’s promising aerospace engineer Fatima Dyczynski, refused to believe that their daughter was dead. They were determined to go to the crash site despite government officials in Australia, Germany and the Netherlands advising victims’ families against immediately travelling to the crisis-torn country. Hoping that, through some miracle, they might find their daughter alive, they became the first relatives to arrive at the crash site. Unable and unwilling to believe that no one had survived the crash, they walked through the rebel-controlled fields with mounting horror at what they witnessed. The disaster area revealed a different story to the one they wanted to believe. Nevertheless, they vowed that they would not give up the search until they had found Fatima alive.

Emma Bell’s father said while he wanted his daughter’s body to be brought home, he did not want to visit the crash site. ‘Ukraine is not Emma and that crash site is not Emma,’ he said.

At the end of Friday 18 July, Dutch minister of foreign affairs Frans Timmermans arrived in Kiev. With him were the Dutch National Forensic Investigation Team (LTFO) as well as the Dutch Safety Board (the DSB, or OVV in Dutch). The DSB had already established an incident team in The Hague; now they would set up another in Kiev.

In view of the fact that a number of countries had let Ukraine know that they would be sending investigation crews to repatriate their dead and help with forensic work, the Ukrainian government asked the Netherlands, who had lost the most civilians in the disaster and had remained neutral and refrained from pointing an accusing finger during those first days, to lead and coordinate the investigation. Forensic teams from different countries would take on the task of identifying the victims and the DSB was to investigate what had actually caused the crash. It would be a difficult task, as there were by this time three major crash locations.

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