The Netherlands is halting the mission to recover victims and debris of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines crash because of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, the Dutch prime minister said on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte told journalists in The Hague the risk posed to the team of 70 Australian, Dutch and Malaysian experts was too great to continue working in the area, the AP reported.
He said it made no sense to continue the operation under the current conditions, according to the AP. "We're stopping now, but we won't stop," he said.
"The security situation in eastern Ukraine and the MH17 crash site has worsened by the day," Rutte said, according to the AP. "That is making it impossible for experts to do their work."
Flight MH17 was shot down on July 17, killing all 298 passengers and crew, 196 of them Dutch citizens, the AP reported. Since the crash, it has found remains of only a few victims, despite expectations it might find as many as 80.
Most bodies have been recovered, but the team is still trying to find the missing victims and their belongings, and an international crash investigation has yet to conduct on-site inquiries, according to the AP.
Rutte said that now that the international recovery team has been able to access the site and communicate with local authorities, it has learned the recovery effort undertaken by local authorities immediately after the crash was more thorough than initially thought, the AP reported.
Local Ukrainian authorities carried out "an intensive search in the area with 800 volunteers, and there were many bodies recovered in those (first) days," he said, according to the AP. Those remains are being identified in the Netherlands.
Earlier Wednesday, a spokesman for the Dutch Safety Board, which is overseeing that investigation, said preliminary findings due Aug. 17 won't be ready until several weeks after that date, the AP reported. Wim van der Weegen said in a telephone interview that is in part because of the difficulty investigators have had in reaching the crash site.
