Almost a week after the Malaysian airliner was shot out of the sky, killing all 298 aboard, the first bodies from the crash were transported to the Netherlands, the country that suffered the hardest toll. Pictures and videos from the Eindhoven Airbase in the Netherlands captured the solemnity and grief of the occasion.
As many as 154 of passengers on the flight were Dutch. Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, compared the scale of the devastation for the Dutch to that of 9/11 in the United States.
Very impressive: A huge procession for the 40 MH17 victims pic.twitter.com/1tGrctrfrb— Michael van Poppel (@mpoppel) July 23, 2014
A video posted on Instagram captured the Australian RAAF C17 transporter carrying the bodies arriving at Eindhoven air base:
The wooden coffins were taken to the awaiting hearses:
Wooden coffins are taken from the planes and placed in a fleet of hearses at Eindhoven air base. pic.twitter.com/uYVp5Rw6Lt— James Chessell (@jameschessell) July 23, 2014
Hearses were lined up on the tarmac:
A news editor at ITV, tweeted that a large number of relatives had come to witness the return of bodies:
An official from eindhoven airport tells me that there are around 1000 relatives of the crash victims here to watch the coffins return #mh17— Rachel Defriez (@racheldefriez) July 23, 2014
At the Dutch airbase, flags flew at half mast:
Pink roses had been placed on the tarmac at the Kharkiv airport in Ukraine before the C130 Hercules aircraft took off for the Netherlands.