Smell of death among the sunflowers
YOU CAN see them for kilometres, strips of white cotton attached to wooden stakes in the fields of eastern Ukraine. Each stake marks a victim from flight MH17, or at least a body part. There are a lot of stakes.
But then there is a lot of debris, a vast wash of metal, charred remnants and the surreal paraphernalia of international long-haul travel smeared over a ruined 25-square kilometre area. The cockpit of the jet was found in one place, and an engine 800m away. Locals found the aircraft’s tail section 10km away.
Among the debris was a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘‘I love Amsterdam’’, and a guidebook to Bali, hinting at what had been the holiday mood of some of the passengers on the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Handbags. Footwear. Passports amid sunflowers. Scattered across the crash site was the unmistakable jetsam of holidays: sun hats and suntan lotion, summer clothing, duty-free shopping, the occasional poolside novel. You could also tell that children were here from the unopened packets of Haribo sweets, the fistful of playing cards, a first-year drawing scrawled in a notebook, a small black-and-white stuffed monkey abandoned in the grass.
Some of the bodies are perfectly intact, some ruined beyond recognition, some partly disrobed by the G-force of falling to earth. One woman lies partly burned, a hand raised above her head, stripped of all but her undergarments.
A young woman, walking with a little boy, turned her face from the grim sight of charred fuselage, twisted seats, mobile phones and teddy bears.
By midday, the bodies of 181 of the 298 victims, from a dozen nations but mostly Dutch, had been found. They were taken to the government-controlled city of Kharkiv for identification.
It was not just the human bodies. An unlikely menagerie of dead pets lay strewn across the scene in the grass, bright blue and yellow macaws, a cockatoo, a random giant St Bernard dog curled peacefully where he fell.
The sticky Ukrainian summer will not be kind to the bodies. Warm sunshine gave way to rain and humidity yesterday.
By late afternoon, the sharp tang of kerosene had been overpowered by something altogether more macabre: the cloying smell of death.
They’re getting used to death here. This is a de facto war zone. Explosions rang out every few minutes as a reminder.
And when separatist rebels first saw the debris falling they thought was they might be under attack. ‘‘Initially I thought it was a paratrooper descending from the plane but then realised that there were people falling from the sky in the passenger seats,’’ said one of the rebels, Vladimir, 45, holding a Kalashnikov.
Rescue workers were overwhelmed by the scene. Volunteer miners combed the long grass for bodies; some of the first emergency workers on the scene bizarrely happened to be a unit trained in scuba diving search and rescue.
‘‘This isn’t our area of expertise,’’ said Boris, 41, an experienced diver who drove his unit to the scene in a Soviet-era military vehicle. ‘‘We have no idea where anything is, we have a huge task ahead of us. We’ve not experienced anything like this, nothing on this scale.’’
Close to the village of Rozsypne, search parties of emergency workers, police officers, farmers and off-duty coal miners – their faces caked in soot from their shifts – disappeared into the fields of sunflowers taller than a man. One volunteer fainted when they discovered a body. Although Russia had offered to send experts from its ministry of emergency situations, Ukraine declined, leaving locals to comb the wreckage, effectively tampering with a crime scene. Access to the sprawling crash site remained difficult and dangerous.
The road into it from Donetsk, the largest city in the region, was marked by five rebel checkpoints yesterday with document checks at each. Aleksandr Borodai, Donetsk’s separatist leader, said 17 representatives from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and four Ukrainian experts had travelled into rebel-controlled areas to begin an investigation into the attack.
The militia allowed them to look at part of the crash site but refused to let them view the area where the engines came down.
Yesterday, witnesses at the crash site reported the arrival of a convoy of 15 vehicles from the OSCE, the first international
This isn’t our area of expertise.
investigators to reach it.
The separatist rebels who control the crash site issued conflicting reports about whether they had found the aircraft’s black boxes.
There was concern that they might have fallen into the hands of pro-Russian separatists, suspected of shooting down the Boeing 777 after mistaking it for a Ukrainian military transport plane.
Borodai denied this. ‘‘No black boxes have been found. We hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened,’’ he said.
Earlier yesterday, however, an aide to the military leader of Borodai’s group said the authorities had recovered eight out of 12 recording devices.
Since aircraft usually have two black boxes – one for recording flight data and the other for recording voices in the cockpit – it was not clear what the aide was referring to.
Moscow said it would not seek to take the black boxes but that international experts should have them as soon as possible. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who initially brushed off suggestions of any Russian responsibility, saying that Ukraine was to blame for the general conflict, later called on both Kiev and the separatists to lay down their weapons and open direct talks.
Despite the pleas for a ceasefire, the thud of Grad missile launchers being fired could still be heard near the crash site.