Australia making efforts to bring home bodies of MH17 victims: Abbott

Prime Minister Tony Abbott today said Australia was making efforts to bring home the bodies of its citizens killed in the Malaysian plane crash in Ukraine, as he demanded that the corpses be “treated with respect”.

Abbott, who spoke to Prime ministers of Malaysia, Britain and the Netherlands, said the efforts to recover the bodies — which are decomposing rapidly in the summer heat — looked “more like a garden clean-up than a forensic investigation”.

“It’s absolutely imperative that we bring them home, but in order to bring them home we’ve got to first get them out,” he said.

“We want to retrieve the bodies, we want to investigate the site, and we want to punish the guilty. That’s what we want to do,” he said.

The Boeing 777 was on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over pro-Russia rebels-held territory of the eastern Ukraine on Thursday.

It is still not clear if the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down purposely or mistakenly.

All 298 people on board were killed in the crash. Twenty-eight Australian nationals and nine residents were on the jet.

“We owe it to the families — all the families — to do everything in our power to respect the bodies, to find the truth and to ensure that justice is done,” he said.

He said former Defence Force chief Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston had been sent to Kiev to lead the Australian response there.

Two investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau are today flying out for Europe, to help with the inquiry into the disaster.

Abbott said that the Government was considering designating the MH17 disaster as a terrorist act.

The move would allow the Government to make compensation payments for those Australian families who lost loved ones.

Families would be eligible for compensation of up to $75,000.

Abbott also spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking him cooperation in the investigation. He said he did not want to go into details about his conversation with Putin.

“I don’t think it is fair to my international interlocutors to go into great detail as to the nature of the conversation, but to President Putin’s credit he did say all the right things, I want to stress what he said was fine,” he said.

“The challenge now is to hold the president to his word. That is certainly my intention, and it should be the intention of the family of nations to hold the president to his word,” he added.

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