MH17: Dutch expert praises Ukraine recovery team, says it 'did a hell of a job'

HRABOVE (Ukraine): The Dutch head of a team sent to identify the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 praised the Ukrainian recovery workers who collected hundreds of bodies from a giant swathe of land in a war zone for doing a "hell of a job". 

Peter van Vliet, leader of a three-man team of Dutch body identification experts, the first international investigators to visit the crash area, said his priority would be getting hundreds of bodies now stored in refrigerated rail cars to a location where they can be identified and sent home. 

Despite reports that some of the bodies may have been looted and were never properly secured during days lying out in summer sun, van Vliet expressed admiration for the recovery crews that gathered them. 

"I'm very impressed about the work that was done over here," he said after inspecting the main crash site, where bodies were still being found a day earlier pinned under chunks of aircraft wreckage. 

Citing the heat and the scale of the site, he said: "I think they did a hell of a job in a hell of a place." 

Passengers from the Netherlands accounted for two-thirds of the 298 victims of Thursday's disaster. 

The Ukrainian government said 282 bodies and 87 fragments had now been found.

At the site, the recovery operation appeared to have completed.

Ukrainian officials hope the bodies can be brought by train to the eastern city of Kharkiv, out of the conflict zone, where international identification teams could examine them.

Van Vliet said he had been promised that the train would be moved later on Monday but not told where it would be sent.

He declined to give an estimate for how long it might take to identify and repatriate the remains.

"My first priority is identifying the victims," he said.