A police officer who was one of the first to pass by the scene of the MH17 crash described the horror of what is one of the world’s largest crime scenes.
Today marks 10 years since the Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing the other 298 people on board.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) officer said children’s toys were scattered between the parts of the frame as far as the eye could see.
And what was once a sunflower box in the village of Hrabove, about 80 kilometers east of Donetsk, has a huge open-air cemetery.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, tragically crashed on July 17, 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine.
The Boeing 777-200ER took off from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and was heading to Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
It was flying at an altitude of about 33,000 feet when it passed through a surface-to-air missile, killing the other 298 people on board, totaling 283 passengers and 15 crew members.
The investigation concluded that the plane was hit by a Buk missile system, a Russian-made medium-range surface-to-air missile.
When the worst fears of the families of those on board became apparent in the days after the downing of flight MH17, unarmed AFP agents were deployed to an active fighting zone patrolled by Russian-backed separatists.
His project was the remains of the victims of MH17.
They found themselves in a gruesome scene: children’s bodies, personal belongings and toys strewn next to burning rubble, as far as the eye can see.
Now, exactly ten years later, AFP Commander Brian McDonald remembers the horrors he witnessed with the 38 Australian victims.
The veteran police officer who led the AFP team in Ukraine said on a police podcast: “The crash site is huge. We knew we were going to have very little time at the crash site. This became evident from the beginning. “
“The ability to bring resources to the crash site is going to be very complicated for us and the fact that we didn’t have loose access to any place we were because we temporarily knew that the crash site was in the middle of the conflict.
“So it was all incredibly complicated and delicate and required a lot of diplomatic communications just to get us going. “
Nothing in McDonald’s decades-long police career could have prepared him for that moment at the accident scene.
He said, “Here’s this dirty airplane wing that’s sitting diagonally across this farm den. And it’s just there.
“We don’t do any of that because it’s so inappropriate. I still don’t forget that day. “
The policeman continued: “The hard truth of seeing this was confronting and even today it is emotional.
“There was the fuselage, and I was the luggage, there were children’s toys scattered probably for more than a mile.
“You know you’re there to do a job, but it’s one of the things that makes you sad about what it was.
“I was passing through and at one point I picked up some papers that, coincidentally, were those of one of the Australian families.
There was fuselage, and I had luggage, there were children’s toys scattered probably for more than a mile.
“And again, it’s around toys, luggage and other children’s stuff and it feels like the horror that the other people on the plane must have experienced. “
But despite the horrors that AFP officials witnessed, it was imperative that they keep the project in mind: go to the bodies and look for evidence.
“It’s a ridiculously giant crime scene,” recalls Detective Sergeant Hilda Sirec.
“I couldn’t shoot around this total scene of almost 50 square kilometers.
“I saw objects everywhere, bone fragments and portions of frames all over the crime scene and it made me realize what the final moments would have been like. “
MC Donald added, “We were on a humanitarian project to try and collect parts of the frame or other points of human identity so we could make sure we identified all the victims of the accident. “
As evidence began to be discovered, the destruction of MH17 looked more like a criminal act and the crash site had one of the largest crime scenes in the world.
The missile that hit Flight MH17 came from a domain controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The Dutch Security Office carried out a thorough investigation and concluded that the missile had been fired from a region controlled by separatists.
The Joint Investigation Team, made up of representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine, showed those findings.
In November 2022, a Dutchman man convicted three men in absentia for their role in the destruction of MH17.
The men, who are linked to the separatists and the Russian military, were convicted of murder and sentenced to prison.
The incident has sparked particularly high tensions between Russia and Western countries, leading to calls for tougher sanctions against Russia and demands for justice for victims.
Russia has consistently denied any involvement, attributing the destruction to Ukrainian forces, a claim widely disputed through the results of investigations.
An expert claimed that Vladimir Putin shot down the MH17 passenger plane as revenge against the United States for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Florence De Changy, who has been searching for missing flight MH370 since its disappearance in 2014, has revealed that the doomed flight could be linked to the downing of MH17 over Ukraine four months later.
In his book, The Disagging Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, he argues that Putin may have given the order to shoot down MH17 to get revenge on the United States and get closer to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
153 Chinese nationals were killed when Flight MH370 crashed after Florence claimed that the U. S. Air Force had failed to kill the country. The U. S. fired the plane from the sky in an attempt to save the secret generation from reaching China.
He said a source revealed that Putin told Xi Jinping after the disappearance: “What happened is acceptable. Leave it to me. “
In 2019, the parents of three young men who died in the tragic Malaysian Airlines crash in 2014 admitted to “considering suicide” after hearing the news.
Otis, 8, Evie, 10, and Mo Maslin, 12, were returning home to Perth, Australia, when they boarded doomed flight MH17 with their grandfather Nick Norris, 68.
Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris told Australian Story: “Where we were, it was hell. “
“Where we are is different, and what we feel we owe to the Australian public is to let them know how we got to where we are. “
In a harrowing interview, the two men said they looked out the window of their apartment in Amsterdam in the early morning hours after the crash.
They deliberated whether or not they deserved to jump together, but in the end they were against it, as they did not need to inflict the pain they felt on anyone else.
Another man, Piet Ploeg, her nephew, brother and sister-in-law in the disaster.
According to him, his nephew’s body “came back in pieces. “
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That’s why The Sun launched the You’re Not Alone campaign. To remember that there is hope when going through a difficult time, suffering from an intellectual illness, or feeling like you have no one to turn to.
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