Netherlands mourns as first bodies arrive

Royal family and PM meet planes; nation observes minute of silence

The first bodies from Flight MH17 arrived in the Netherlands on Wednesday almost a week after it was shot down over Ukraine, with grieving relatives and the king and queen solemnly receiving the as yet unidentified victims.

Church bells rang out throughout the country as the planes touched down with the much-delayed return of the first 40 bodies of the 298 people killed in the disaster, most of them Dutch.

In a reminder of the ongoing war that is hampering recovery and investigation efforts, the Ukrainian military said two of its fighter jets had been shot down on Wednesday, possibly close to the Boeing's crash site.

The Netherlands has been united in grief and growing anger because of delays in getting bodies home and over the way separatists have treated the crash site, bodies and personal possessions.

The planes left from Kharkiv in Ukraine, where the bodies were given a dignified ceremony as they were carried on board by army cadets before a small party of officials.

Around 1,000 bereaved relatives of the 193 Dutch dead, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, Prime Minister Mark Rutte and representatives of the other nations that lost citizens on the flight met the planes.

The bodies are to be transferred to a military base at Hilversum, southeast of Amsterdam, where forensics experts will identify them.

Flags of the 11 nations that lost citizens in the crash flew at half mast at the airport.

Uniformed members of the Dutch military marched to the planes to unload the wooden coffins, while a trumpeter played the Last Post and Reveille.

Motorways along the 100-kilometer route from Eindhoven to Hilversum have been closed for the long convoy of hearses to pass, one coffin per car.

A minute's silence was observed nationwide, during which no flights landed or took off at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, from where the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight took off on Thursday.

Mistakenly shot down?

US intelligence officials said they believe rebels mistakenly shot down the plane that was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with a surface-to-air missile.

"The most plausible explanation ... was that it was a mistake" and that the missile was fired by "an ill-trained crew" using a system that requires some skill and training, said a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We've all seen mistakes in the past," the official told reporters, in reference to a Korean airliner downed by a Soviet fighter jet in 1983, and an Iranian passenger plane shot down by US naval forces in 1988.

Experts and world leaders have expressed concern that not all the remains have been recovered from the sprawling crash site in rebel-held territory.

"It's quite possible that many bodies are still out there, in the open in the European summer, subject to interference, and subject to the ravages of heat and animals," said Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country lost 28 nationals.

The black boxes were delivered to Britain for expert analysis on Wednesday. They went to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch headquarters in Farnborough, southwest of London.

Experts were set to go through the information from the cockpit voice recorder, which should give them hours of conversations by the flight crew.

The Netherlands and other countries that lost citizens in the downing of Flight MH17 are proposing sending police officers to secure the crash site.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the offer was made by Rutte "to provide security at the crash scene and surrounding area in order to ensure an independent international investigation into the reasons for the catastrophe".

(China Daily 07/24/2014 page11)