International investigators have begun gathering body parts and belongings of victims in the fields where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine.
The 70-member team of Dutch and Australian experts is in a process of combing through a patch of scrubland, not far from the scene of fierce clashes between Ukrainian soldiers and separatist rebels.
Fighting in eastern Ukraine had earlier prevented investigators from reaching the scene of the crash site.
Officials with Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe or OSCE say that they expect to continue their recovery work with detector dogs and other high-tech gear set to arrive to assist in the operation.
Michael Bociurkiw is spokesman for OSCE Special Mission to Ukraine.
"The detector dogs, I believe, are coming in tomorrow as well so that will be a big, new asset that they have and other high-tech gear that will help them to do the search much more efficiently because as most of you know, that is still an active conflict zone. And, the kind of approach to all of this work is to do things as quickly as possible. It's not a normal site, in that regard, so time is of the essence, too."
The remains of at least 80 people are believed to still lay unrecovered at the crash site.
Investigators say that recovered remains will be put in refrigerated train carriages and taken to the nearby city of Kharkiv before being flown to the Netherlands for examination and identification.
