Tony Abbott sends further 100 Australian Officers to help secure MH17 crash site

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Takes total of AFP officers in Europe to almost 200
Tony Abbott stressed it is a 'humanitarian' mission
Some officers will be armed and there will be some ADF soldiers
Prime Minister spoke in Canberra on Friday where Operation Bring Them Home is being co-ordinated
More bodies were found after it emerges that 100 of MH17's 298 passengers and crew remain unaccounted for
Netherland, Australia, Great Britain, Germany and Malaysia are forming a five-nation coalition tasked with securing the crash site

Published: 02:44 EDT, 25 July 2014 | Updated: 08:12 EDT, 25 July 2014

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Australia will deploy a further 100 Federal Police Officers to help secure the crash site of MH17, bringing the total of Australian officers on the ground in Europe to almost 200.

Members of the Australian Defence Force will also be among the officers, Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed on Friday.

'It is a strong and purposeful mission that we are undertaking in grief,' Mr Abbott said.

The news comes as more human remains and wreckage has been uncovered during a visit by three Australian officials to the MH17 site in eastern Ukraine.

Mr Abbott spoke while visiting the Australian Federal Police operations room in Canberra where Operation Bring Them Home is being co-ordinated.

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Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Tony Negus announced another 100 Federal Police Officers will be deployed to Europe to help with the MH17 investigation

'Previously undiscovered wreckage has been found and I regret to say more human remains have been found and we expect that further remains will be found in the days ahead,' Mr Abbott said.

He said this made it more important than ever to properly secure the site.

Currently 90 AFP officers have been pre-deployed to Europe under a Dutch-led investigation.

'I want to stress that this is a police led mission and a humanitarian mission to ensure that we bring them home,' the Prime Minister said.

'Lets never forget there are 298 innocent people who have been wronged,' he added.

'All we want to do is claim our dead and bring them home.'

Mr Abbott was keen to hammer home that Australia is not getting involved in Ukrainian politics.

'The internal politics of Ukraine is a matter for the Ukrainians,' he said.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott, seen here alongside Australian Federal Police Commissioner Tony Negus, stressed that the AFP officers are being sent on a 'humanitarian' mission

Assistant AFP commissioner Michael Outrim shows Prime Minister Tony Abbott an aerial view of the MH17 crash site during a visit to the Coordination Centre at the Australian Federal Police headquarters in Canberra on Friday

Australia is close to finalising an agreement with the Ukraine for the deployment of Australian police, some of whom will be armed, to the investigation.

'Many of the AFP won't be armed but some will be,' the PM said.

He explained that the operation to secure the site is expected to take no more than a few weeks.

Crash investigators have made several significant discoveries as the search for bodies from flight MH17 continues in Ukraine.

More wreckage from the Malaysia Airlines plane was found, including a 'huge piece of fuselage' in a heavily wooded area near the sprawling crash site in Donetsk Oblast.

The search team has also discovered more bodies, after it emerged that as many as 100 of the flight's passengers and crew remain unaccounted for.

The discoveries come on the same day that it was announced a five-nation coalition has been formed, tasked with securing the MH17 crash site.

It is thought the countries involved - Netherlands, Australia, Great Britain, Germany and Malaysia - will provide forces to take control of the 50-square-kilemetre site, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

A piece of wreckage from MH17 found at the crash site in Petropavlivka, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. More large parts of the downed airliner were discovered today as Dutch investigators took charge of the crash site

A Malaysian air crash investigator photographs sections of the wreckage near the village of Hrabove

The new finds have underscored the need for further investigation - even as fighting closes in on the region and farmers desperate to harvest their crops work their fields with heavy machinery.

Newly discovered human remains have been marked with white flags but investigators said they do not have the equipment they need to move them.

Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as saying the piece of fuselage 'appeared out of nowhere'.

'The most significant find today was we went into a heavily wooded area and found a huge piece of fuselage,' he said.

'I think this is the part of the plane that came down which ... travellers would say resembles an airline. The windows were still intact and if one wanted to they could even climb inside and be covered.

The OSCE says this is the biggest piece of the Malaysia Airlines plane found so far. The fuselage was found in the forest with some of the windows still intact

'So that was again in a wooded area and it almost appeared out of nowhere because there were no tell-tale signs, no broken branches, nothing to indicate that a piece of fuselage had landed there.'

Paul McGeough, reporting from the crash site for the Sydney Morning Herald, said an OSCE official told him that investigators had made 'extraordinary' finds.

'The Malaysians who were with us observed that the heat was so intense that the aluminium wing sections of this 17-year-old aircraft actually melted,' he quoted the official as saying.

The five-nation task force, which is being formed with the help of the OCSE, Is expected to be led by the Dutch with Australia taking a deputy role.

Meanwhile, Germany and Britain are reportedly deciding which forces to send into the rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.

Vlad, 10, points out part of the wreckage of flight MH17 that fell into a tree near his family's home

A piece of the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 near the village of Petropavlivka

More parts of MH17's wreckage in the village of Petropavlivka

However, the five-nation arrangement has not yet been signed off by Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko and it will also need to go through the Ukraine Parliament.

When it comes into effect officials from the Netherlands, Australia, Great Britain, Germany and Malaysia will be allowed freedom of movement in Ukraine for the purpose of the international investigation.

The crash site is now officially the responsibility of Dutch investigators, but there have been complaints that rebel fighters have caused problems by blocking access and harassing recovery workers.

As foreign ministers from Australia and the Netherlands met Ukrainian officials to coordinate the investigation, the head of Ukraine's Emergency Situations Service and the chief of a Dutch police mission said their work was being hampered.

Pockmarked section of MH17 by the road in Petropavlivka, showing the damage it sustained in the crash

A piece of the wreckage of MH17 bearing the Malaysian flag lies in a field near Petropavlivka

Vehicles transporting observers from the OSCE drive through the main crash site

The OSCE, however, said there had been no incidents, and that they had been joined by experts from Malaysia and Australia, which lost 28 citizens in the crash.

'They took away our tents, the ones which were at our base camp,' Serhiy Bochkovsky, the head of the emergencies service, told a news conference in the eastern city of Kharkiv from where the remains of the victims are starting their journey home.

'We were allowed only our equipment and machinery and we were chased away at gunpoint.'

He did not say when this happened.

The head of the Dutch police mission in Ukraine also said it was difficult to get access to the site to look for more of the remains of the victims, many of whom were Dutch.

'But the process is not over, there are still remains in your country and it's very hard to get there because there are some, and I would say it's not politically correct, but there are still some lunatics there,' Jan Tuinder said.

'It's very hard for us to get to the remains.'

A pro-Russian militant holds up a stuffed animal as others look on at the site of the MH17 crash. 298 people were killed when the plane was apparently blasted out the sky by a surface to air missile

Gun wielding: Pro-Russian rebels, followed by international observers, walk by plane wreckage as they arrive for a media briefing at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 this week

VIDEO

Flight MH17: Latest video from Malaysian plane shot down

Wreckage: A man looks at the debris scattered at the crash site of the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, in a field near the village of Hrabove in the rebel-held Donetsk region of Ukraine

Tragic: A child's shoe is seen among the wreckage of MH17. A week after the disaster took place, the crash site is still littered with debris and, in some cases, body parts

Care: Coffins containing the remains of MH17 are removed from a transport plane at Eindhoven airport. The dignified reception was in stark contrast to the treatment of the victims' remains in eastern Ukraine

Remembrance: Stewardesses at Schiphol airport observe one-minute of silence in remembrance of the victims of flight MH17

But asked about the incidents, OSCE spokesman Mr Bociurkiw said: 'None whatsoever.'

The Netherlands formally took over the investigation into the crash from Ukraine on Thursday after the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the downing of the plane and demanding armed groups allow 'safe, secure, full and unrestricted access' to the site.

In Kiev, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she expected the separatists to allow a better international presence at the site.

'Now that the legal framework is in place ... and that Ukraine has transferred legal responsibility to the Netherlands, we feel we'll get more progress from the separatists,' she said.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop signed an agreement with her Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin that will provide a legal basis for Australia's presence in that country.

Putting the Dutch in charge of the criminal investigation was a way to get around the opposition to the UN Security Council resolution voiced by Russia should Kiev lead the probe, Ms Bishop said.

On Wednesday, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands broke down in tears alongside members of the Dutch royal family as the first bodies of those killed in the MH17 crash arrived back in Holland during a poignant and emotional ceremony attended by relatives of the victims.

Upset: Queen Maxima of the Netherlands (pictured centre alongside her husband King Willem-Alexander) wipes away a tear as the bodies of victims of the MH17 crash are removed from an air force transport plane

Respect: King Willem-Alexander (second left) Queen Maxima (third left) and Prime Minister Mark Rutte (third right) observe a minute of silence during a ceremony to mark the return of the first bodies of passengers and crew killed in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

A convoy of hearses carry bodies and remains from those killed on Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on July 24, in Boxtel, Netherlands

The remains of around 40 international victims of the Malaysia Airlines tragedy left Ukraine's Kharkiv airport on two military planes, ahead of a painstaking identification process.

The dignified reception at Eindhoven airport is in stark contrast to the treatment of the victims' remains in eastern Ukraine in the days after the crash, where pro-Russian rebels left corpses to decay in the summer heat in body bags dumped around the crash site.

Among those attending the solemn ceremony were King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, who held on to each other's hands as the bodies were removed from the transporter aircraft. At several points the Dutch queen was seen wiping tears from her face.

British father Barry Sweeney, 52, travelled through the night to meet the planes in the hope that the body of his son Liam, 28, might be on board.

He said: ‘We need closure. We need to see our children. All the families, the mums, the dads, brothers, sisters, we need them back here.’

He and his other son Marc, 25, comforted each other during the sombre ceremony yesterday.

Undignified: Dozens of bodies of MH17 victims were seen being loaded on to a rubbish truck so they could be removed from the crash site and taken to a train station in Torez

Discarded: Body bags containing the remains of MH17 passengers were seen dumped around the crash site for several days after the crash. Many of the bodies were decomposing in the summer heat

Heartbreaking: A handwritten note amongst the wreckage reads 'I want to finish our planned holiday without blowing our budget'

Mourning: Two women hug in front of a flower tribute at the entrance to the Korporaal van Oudheusdenkazerne, army barracks, in Hilversum, The Netherlands, where the bodies of the people killed in the Malaysia Airlines MH17 air crash in Ukraine will be identified

Dutch military personal then carried each coffin on their shoulders to a motorcade of hearses. They were driven to military barracks in Hilversum, where the process of identifying them began.

Last night, it was unclear whether any of the bodies that arrived in the Netherlands were those of British citizens.

Mr Sweeney, from Killingworth, North Tyneside, managed to catch a flight from Newcastle to Amsterdam early yesterday morning after renewing his passport on a fast-track.

Mr Sweeney, a full-time carer for terminally-ill wife Lesley, 53, told the Mail last night: ‘The whole day has been very moving. There were lots of tears.

‘The ceremony did everyone proud – not just the Dutch but all the nations. The Dutch handled everything really well. The victims were brought home with dignity here.

‘It’s such a contrast to what happened in Ukraine.’

Tony Abbott