{"id":33936,"date":"2014-07-23T13:40:23","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T13:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=33936"},"modified":"2014-07-23T12:30:24","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T12:30:24","slug":"mh17-victims-begin-long-journey-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2014\/07\/mh17-victims-begin-long-journey-home\/","title":{"rendered":"MH17 victims begin long journey home"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first planes carrying bodies from flight MH17 have left Ukraine for the Netherlands, which is holding a day of mourning for the 298 victims.<\/p>\n

Experts there will begin to identify the dead, most of whom were Dutch.<\/p>\n

Pro-Russian rebels have been widely accused of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane on 17 July.<\/p>\n

UK government sources say intelligence shows rebels deliberately tampered with evidence, moving bodies and placing parts from other planes in the debris.<\/p>\n

US intelligence officials had earlier released evidence to the media that they said showed the separatists’ involvement in downing the plane.<\/p>\n

Rebels were also accused of exaggerating the number of bodies transported from the crash site to the town of Kharkiv on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

They had claimed 282 bodies had been loaded on to a train, but experts said only 200 could be verified.<\/p>\n

The first 40 coffins were slowly loaded on to two military planes at Kharkiv airport on Wednesday morning by a military guard of honour.<\/p>\n

Ambassadors, officials and soldiers gathered to see off the planes.<\/p>\n

Australian government envoy Angus Houston said the ceremony was intended to give the victims the “respect and dignity they deserve” after a “tragedy of unspeakable proportions”.<\/p>\n

Dutch government representative Hans Docter said the victims had begun their “long journey” home.<\/p>\n

The first flight is due to arrive in Eindhoven at 16:00 local time (14:00 GMT) and will be met by members of the Dutch royal family and Prime Minister Mark Rutte.<\/p>\n

Churches around the Netherlands will ring their bells for five minutes before the planes land.<\/p>\n

The bodies are then due to be taken to the Korporaal van Oudheusden barracks south of Hilversum for identification.<\/p>\n

Mr Rutte said that process could take months.<\/p>\n

In a separate process, the “black box” flight-data recorders from MH17 have arrived in the UK, where they will be examined at the headquarters of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch in Farnborough.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, fighting between Ukrainian government forces and rebels around the rebel stronghold of Donetsk has reportedly left 16 people dead.<\/p>\n

A statement from overall military commander Igor Strelkov posted on a rebel website said he had withdrawn his fighters from the outskirts of Donetsk.<\/p>\n

He said they had pulled back and were prepared to defend their positions.<\/p>\n

And Ukrainian officials confirmed to the BBC that two aircraft, thought to be military jets, had been downed just 35km (20 miles) from the crash site.<\/p>\n

The officials had no information on the cause of the crashes, or the fate of the pilots.<\/p>\n

The fighting in eastern Ukraine erupted in April and is believed to have claimed more than 1,000 lives.<\/p>\n

Separately, a rebel militiaman\u00a0told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera<\/a>\u00a0that he had been ordered to the crash site minutes after the MH17 plane had gone down.<\/p>\n

He said his commanders had told him: “We’ve just shot down one of the Kiev fascists’ planes.”<\/p>\n

The militiaman said: “We thought we were looking for baled-out Ukrainian pilots but instead we found dead civilians.”<\/p>\n

Earlier in Washington, officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence presented evidence they had gathered on the involvement of the rebels.<\/p>\n

“It’s a solid case that it’s an SA-11 [missile] that was fired from eastern Ukraine under conditions the Russians helped create,” said the officials, who requested that their names not be reported.<\/p>\n

They said the “most plausible explanation” for the shooting down of the plane was that rebels mistook it for another aircraft.<\/p>\n

The evidence they presented included:<\/p>\n