KIEV, July 21 — After three days of delay, three Malaysian accredited investigators are to arrive at the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH17 crash site in Torez, eastern Ukraine tomorrow.
Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said they comprised two senior engineers and a former pilot.
Liow said they are Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) senior assistant director, Capt Philip Joseph Selvaraju (former pilot), 42, DCA senior assistant director, Mohd Naemy Fahmy Mustapa, 38, and MAS engineering and maintenance director, Azhari Mohd Dahlan, 53.
He said Azhari has 32 years of experience working in engineering while Capt Philip has 16 years in aerospace field and former Royal Malaysian Air Force pilot Mohd Naemy has six years in engineering.
“Malaysia succeeded to send its investigators to the crash scene after the government has negotiated with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and several separatist groups,” he told Malaysian journalists here today.
The MAS flight, MH17, was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it went down in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine near the Russian border on Thursday night.
The Boeing 777-200 aircraft was carrying 298 people — 283 passengers and 15 crew.
Foreign media reports said the aircraft was shot down but until today no one had claimed responsibility for the incident.
Liow said the trio would be flown to Kharkev, a district beside Donetsk, tonight at 8 pm and they would spend the night there.
The next day, several OSCA personnel would come to escort them in an armoured vehicle to Usim, another location before being handed over to a separatist group, he said.
He said from there, a separatist group would bring them on the armoured vehicle to penetrate into Donetsk and then another separatist group would escort them to the crash site in Torez.
“The journey on the vehicle will take them five hours. Despite the escort, there is no 100 per cent guaranty of their safety,” he said.
On the repartriation of the bodies onboard MH17, Liow said Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko had pledged to expedite the process and to move all the bodies, which had been kept in a refrigerated cart train, to Kiev.
“But he did not give any time frame when the bodies will arrive,” he said. — Bernama
