Workers started winching debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on to trucks in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, paving the way for its eventual return to the Netherlands four months after it was downed, killing 298 people.
A crew from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic — the pro-Moscow separatists who hold the territory — supervised by Dutch experts used metal saws to cut up the wreckage before it was lifted on to trucks at the remote crash site near the village of Grabove.
After being collected, the debris from the airliner is to be transported to the government-controlled city of Kharkiv and then flown to the Netherlands. Dutch experts eventually intend to reconstruct a section of the airliner.
A rebel official said the crew of some 15 people from Donetsk’s emergency ministry hoped to finish the operations in the next 10 days. The team faces a race to complete the recovery effort before harsh winter conditions in the former Soviet state make it difficult to continue.
A preliminary report by Dutch investigators published in September found the plane was hit by a large number of “high-energy objects.”
The Flight MH17 probe team has so far managed to collect and identify the remains of 289 victims from the tragedy but its operations have been disrupted by fierce fighting in the area between Ukrainian forces and rebels.
In the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, fresh shelling broke out on Sunday afternoon after a quiet morning, a reporter said. In the neighboring separatist region of Lugansk, three volunteers fighting for the Ukrainian forces were killed, the interior ministry in Kiev said.
Over 4,100 people have been killed in the conflict since April and almost one million have been driven from their homes, according to UN figures.
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