KYIV. Aug 7 (Interfax) - The international mission working at the Malaysian Boeing Airliner crash site in the Donetsk region will continue until all the remains of the air crash victims, and their personal belongings have been found, mission head Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg said.
In spite of the large number of people working at the scene, a certain amount of time is needed to collect the bodies and remains of the victims and their personal belongings; the mission is not over yet, he said at a crisis media center in Kyiv on Wednesday.
Aalbersberg also said that experts have found no human remains at the crash site in the past three days. The mission experts have spent the past few days determining which parts of the scene had not been inspected yet, which could partly explain why the team found no human remains in the past three days, said the mission head.
He said up to 100 experts had been working for six days, now accompanied by representatives from the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation Organization).
Aalbersberg also appealed to local residents, asking them to bring whatever personal belongings of the plane passengers they find, adding that that it appears that some of them have found victims' bodies and their personal belongings.
Aalbersberg said he had renewed this call for help on Wednesday by distributing leaflets urging people to return whatever personal belongings they pick up to the playground in the village of Rassypnoye (Shakhtarsk district, Donetsk region). These items will be returned to the victims' families and therefore any help from local population will be greatly appreciated, he said.
The mission head thanked the local Ukrainian authorities for assisting the mission. The mission is not over yet and cannot proceed without the authorities' assistance, he said.
In Soledar, local residents are helping the mission workers to organize the work of volunteers, and cooking, he said. They have made our difficult work in the field slightly easier, and we are grateful for their help, he said.
It was reported that the search at the air crash site on Monday led to the discovery of personal belongings of some of the passengers, in particular, a passport and photo albums.
The Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777, which was flying from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), crashed in east Ukraine on July 17. All 298 people on board were killed, including 192 Dutch (one of them also had a U.S. citizenship), 44 Malaysians, including the 15 crew members, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, ten Britons (one also had a South African citizenship), four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.