Despite continued fighting between rebels and Ukrainian army, officers spend five hours combing the airliner’s wreckage

A large team of international investigators, including Australian police, have recovered human remains and passenger belongings from the MH17 crash site during their first visit to the area.



An 80-strong Australian and Dutch team spent five hours combing farmland, paddocks and villages in eastern Ukraine in an operation that could last up to 10 days.



While deadly clashes between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian rebels continued nearby, the recovery mission was not under threat, Australian Federal Police national security specialist Andrew Colvin said. The officers were not armed.



“All parties involved respected the conditions set to allow safe passage both in an out of the wreckage site and at the wreckage site itself,” deputy commissioner Colvin told reporters in Canberra on Saturday.



Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch recovery mission, said in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev that the experts were able to gather some of the human remains. He would not give details out of respect for the victims’ relatives. Nearly 200 of the 298 victims were Dutch.

The pace set on Friday hinted at the magnitude of the task ahead.

Aalbersberg said a team of 30 experts spent two hours after lunchtime searching an area of just 25 sq metres. The overall area to explore covers more than 20 sq kms.

“If we have maximum capacity, we think we need at least three weeks to do a full search, but that’s a very thin prospect,” he said.

Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, welcomed news that police had accessed the crash site, but warned a lengthy task still lay ahead.



He could not say how many bodies had been recovered overnight, nor how many more could lay undiscovered in the search area.



“It will be a long and slow process and I expect our officials will be on site for a week or so yet and that’s assuming nothing goes wrong,” Abbott told reporters in Sydney on Saturday.



He said police were working under difficult and dangerous conditions in a high-risk environment but that their efforts were justified by the importance of the task.



The remains will be put in refrigerated train cars Saturday, taken 190 miles (300 kilometers) to the city of Kharkiv and then flown to the Netherlands.

“Perseverance pays off,” Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said. “The first step has been taken, but the security situation is still volatile.”

Colvin was confident the search will continue on Saturday but admits safety considerations need to be assessed daily. “We won’t take any unnecessary risks.”



Police are working in hot and difficult conditions at the site. Each day the team will travel from an Australian base located away from the crash site.

It is more than two weeks since the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet came down after being hit by a missile, killing all 298 people on board, including 38 Australian residents.