Netherlands mourns as bodies of MH17 plane crash victims are flown home - by Philip Oltermann

Ij the Netherlands a day of national mourning

As the first coffin was lowered from the planes on the runway, silence fell over Eindhoven military airport. The only sound came from a row of flags whipping in the wind at half mast.

Almost a week after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot from the skies above Ukraine, 40 bodies arrived on Wednesday in the Netherlands, the country that bore the heaviest toll in the crash.

King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima and the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, joined about 1,000 relatives and friends of the victims, who gathered at the airport for a ceremony receiving the two military transport planes.

A lone trumpeter played the Last Post as troops in dress uniform saluted then carried the wooden caskets to a row of hearses. They drove from the airport under military police escort to an army barracks in the central city of Hilversum where forensic experts were waiting to begin the painstaking task of identifying the remains.
Crowds gathered on bridges along the 65-mile route to throw flowers on to the convoy of 40 hearses.

The Dutch government had declared a day of national mourning – the first since the death of Queen Wilhelmina in 1962 – and at 4.07pm a minute's silence was requested across the country.

Two-hundred and ninety-eight passengers and crew were killed when the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpar was shot down last Thursday a week today. The Dutch victims numbered 193. In a nation of just 16 million, few have been unaffected by the disaster.

Read more: Netherlands mourns as bodies of MH17 plane crash victims are flown home | World news | The Guardian

Ukraine: Dutch investigators say remains of bodies from Aircraft downed and held by pro-Russian rebels not refrigerated

Dutch investigators inspected bodies recovered from downed passenger airliner MH17 which had been loaded onto a train under rebel control not far from the crash site, an AFP reporter said.

Each of the train wagons carrying the corpses was opened and examined by two men wearing masks and headlights. The stench from the wagon was overpowering and, contrary to claims that the carriages were refrigerated, there was little sign that the remains in black body bags were being chilled.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Monday that the Netherlands should head up the investigation into downed flight MH17 and that Kiev was ready to "send all bodies to Amsterdam".

"We are ready for the Netherlands to take upon itself the coordination of the international investigation as the country that suffered the most," Yatsenyuk said.

Another 21 bodies have been found in the east Ukraine village where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17 crashed last week. All 298 people aboard were killed.  Local rescue workers had piled 21 black body bags by the side of the road in Hrabove early on Monday, adds the Associated Press report.

It was unclear how quickly they would be transported to refrigerated railcars in the nearby town of Torez, where the other bodies are being held.

The United Nations Security Council is expected to consider a resolution demanding that pro-Russian separatists provide "full and unrestricted access" to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was

The document, proposed by Australia and co-sponsored by countries like France, also calls on all actors in the region to fully cooperate in an international probe of the incident.

It demands that all military activities, including by armed groups, be "immediately ceased in the immediate area surrounding the crash site to allow for security and safety of the international investigation."

US Secretary of State John Kerry laid out "extraordinary circumstantial evidence" on Sunday that Ukrainian pro-Russian rebels were behind the downing of a Malaysian jet hit by weapons obtained from Russia.

US intelligence suggests that a sophisticated SA11 missile system was used to bring down flight MH17 on Thursday as it flew at some 33,000 feet over Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Kerry said. A total of 298 people on board were killed in the disaster that has shocked the world.

"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists," Kerry told CNN as he blitzed the Sunday television talk shows.

"We know with confidence, with confidence, that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point in time. So it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists."

The top US diplomat also slammed "grotesque" scenes at the crash site where he said rebels were hampering the investigation and the proper removal of the bodies.

Overall situation so far is chaotic with no real coordinated efforts by the West to take charge of the recovery activities and accident investigation or defensive measures to eliminate the possibility of future missile attacks from the separatist and their Russian allies.

EU-Digest

Russia’s Vladimir Putin cranks up Soviet-era propaganda machine while EU and US put their heads in the sand - by Fisher

When a bear is cornered it becomes angrier and more unpredictable.

That is where Vladimir Putin’s Russia has found itself since a Malaysian airliner was shot down out of the sky near the Russian border on Thursday. The president’s dream of making Russia a respected global player again has run into trouble at its first stop in Ukraine. On the defensive on all fronts, Putin is cranking up, rather than toning down his impressive propaganda apparatus.

As evidence of Moscow’s deep complicity in the shooting down of the civilian jet piles up, it has become obvious that instead of using this horrific tragedy — which resulted in the murder of 298 people on board — as a way to find a solution to the Russian-inspired conflict inUkraine, the Kremlin intends to continue brazenly asserting that it bears no responsibility whatsoever for how a passenger jet and human remains ended up strewn across wheat and sunflower fields in eastern Ukraine.

The difference this time — unlike when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in March or during the four months that it  has fomented political instability in eastern Ukraine — is that almost nobody outside of Russia believes anything that Moscow has to say any longer.

Peace in Europe is clearly in more danger than ever from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea if an emboldened Russia believes such behaviour will continue to be free of consequences. Still, it remains an open question whether Europe, with its long history of appeasement and looking the other way, will finally join North America in taking harsh steps to freeze the Russian economy and conclude an emergency trans-Atlantic energy pact to control the fallout if Russia responds to punitive sanctions by cutting off energy supplies to the West.

At least for public consumption, Russia has a starkly different interpretation of what happened last week in the skies over the Ukrainian-Russian border. Setting aside some of the wildest claims by Moscow’s yellow tabloids about how those killed in the crash were already dead before the missile struck, a good starting point is the sharp disappointment that observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have repeatedly expressed over the lack of access they have received to the crash site, which is in rebel-held territory.

Russian state media have made no mention of any such difficulties or the way masked men with assault weapons were overseeing the bodies being “piled in a heap” in refrigerated railway cars,  according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Rather, as RIA Novosti reported on Sunday, “by taking its time” it was Kyiv that had caused the delays in reaching and collecting the bodies of the crash victims.

Another report by Novosti claimed this weekend that the OSCE had found no problem with how the bodies were being handled. In fact, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who lost more than 150 compatriots in the crash, has expressed his outrage to Putin over Russia’s handling of this issue.

As for who was responsible for the missile launch, Itar-Tass, said Sunday that a “reputable” Russian expert had told the state-run news agency that a tape posted by Ukrainian security services on the Internet only hours after Thursday’s incident in which Russian-backed separatists spoke of shooting down a civilian airliner, was “a fake” that had been patched together from three different recordings.

Note EU-Digest: it is high time for the West to take some joint action - Putin must be made to understand that they can't get away with this kind of uncivilized behavior.
Read more Fisher: Russia’s Vladimir Putin cranks up Soviet-era propaganda machine

Ukraine says rebels blocking crash inquiry

Pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine are being accused of blocking the investigation into the apparent shooting-down of a Malaysian passenger jet with 298 people on board.

The accusations were made as observers from the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) arrived at the crash site for a second time on Saturday, a day after they were asked to leave after being given limited access to the farmland where the jet went down.

Ukraine's government said that it had evidence Russia was helping pro-Moscow rebels cover up and destroy evidence from the crash site.

"Terrorists with the support of Russia are trying to destroy proof of this international crime," the government said in a statement on Saturday, adding that rebels had removed 38 bodies from the scene and were blocking Ukrainian investigators from accessing the site.

Read more: Ukraine says rebels blocking crash inquiry - Europe - Al Jazeera English