TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The first of the 298 people killed in the MH17 disaster has been identified by forensic experts, Dutch officials said on Saturday.
"It's a Dutch citizen and the victim's family and mayor of where they lived have been informed," the Dutch Ministry of Justice said in a written statement.
Two-thirds of the people killed in the July 17 missile attack were citizens of the Netherlands and the Dutch government is in charge of identifying the victims.
"The team of 200 specialists is busy with the identification process, but warns that it can take months for all the victims to be identified," the statement said.
DNA samples taken from family members are being used to identify the remains of the passengers and crew.
Where possible, those samples and DNA samples from the remains will likely be checked against ante-mortem data, like samples of hair taken from sources like a victim’s hair or toothbrush.
Dental records may also be used, where necessary and where possible. Such techniques will spare relatives being called in to visually identify their loved ones.
The remains that have been repatriated to the Netherlands so far had been labeled and numbered before being transported from Donetsk to the designated operations center in Kharkiv where Interpol's incident response team and international disaster victim identification teams from seven countries carried out preliminary examinations.
They were then flown to Eindhoven before being taken to the Korporaal van Oudheusden barracks at Hilversum, south of Amsterdam, where the international team of forensic experts will carry out the enormous task of identifying 298 victims.
Their task has been made all that much harder because of the amount of time it took to recover the bodies, the effect of the temperatures of the Ukrainian summer and the contamination of the site by separatist rebels.
Between Wednesday and Saturday last week 227 coffins carrying the bodies of those killed were flown back to the Netherlands for identification.
Not all of the remains have been recovered from the Ukrainian crash site, which is spread over kilometers and still controlled by rebel separatists.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and her Dutch counterpart, Frans Timmermans, were due to return to Kiev on Sunday to continue to negotiate to send armed Australian troops into Ukraine to secure the crash site and expedite the recovery process.
The plan, which has the approval of the Dutch government, needs to be ratified by the Ukrainian parliament, which has been thrown into chaos after the coalition government collapsed and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk resigned.
INDRI MAULIDAR | THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
