Flight MH17

Four days in a row thousands of people lined the 100 km (62 mile) route, watching from motorway bridges as the cortege travelled from Eindhoven to the military base at Hilversum where the bodies will remain until they can be identified, a task that could take months. As the cortege passed, drivers spontaneously stopped their cars and watched silently from the side of the motorway. Some clapped in tribute, others threw flowers on the hearses.

Day 1: photos 1, 2 and the main article photo: July 23, 2014 – 19:10 @ A27 hmp66.3
Day 2: photos 3 and 4: July 24, 2014 – 19:27 @ A27/N409
Day 3 and 4: no photos, just respect

The bodies of the first victims from a Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine last week arrived earlier in the day at a military base in the Netherlands – a nation in shock and sorrow. Bells pealed and flags flew at half mast in memory of the 298 people killed when flight MH17 came down in an area of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists, in the first national day of mourning since wartime Queen Wilhelmina died in 1962. King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined dignitaries on the tarmac as two military aircraft carrying 40 plain wooden coffins landed at Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands. A military guard of honour stood to attention as a trumpeter played The Last Post, the military funeral call for people killed in war. After a minute’s silence – observed in stations, factories, offices and streets across this stunned nation – servicemen from all four branches of the Dutch military boarded the Dutch Hercules C-130 and Australian Boeing C-17 to carry the coffins to 40 waiting hearses lined up on the runway.

Church bells tolled as the planes carrying the remains arrived from Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, shortly before 4 p.m. (14:00 GMT), and windmills around the low-lying coastal nation had been set in a mourning position – with the topmost sail fixed counter-clockwise from the vertical. Trains came to a stop as the country observed a minute’s silence. No planes took off or landed at Schiphol Airport, from which the Malaysia Airlines flight departed, for 13 minutes around the time the bodies landed. At Schiphol, airline and airport officials gathered in silence before a vast sea of flowers that has been swelling in front of the terminal building in the days since the crash, as travellers flying from the airport left their own tributes.

The process will be repeated many times over coming days as the bodies of all the victims are brought home.

(Sour©e: Reuters.com)