Netherlands observes day of national mourning for MH17 victims

The national flag of the Netherlands is flown at half staff at Dam Square during a national day of mourning for the victims killed in Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 plane disaster last Thursday, in Amsterdam July 23, 2014.[Photo/Agencies]

With so many of their countrymen dead, the Dutch have been taking a leading role in the international effort to recover and identify the bodies and investigate the cause of the crash.

Dutch authorities are leading the investigation, with extensive help from other countries. The plane's black box flight recorders, handed over by the rebels' leader, were flown from Ukraine on a Belgian military plane on Tuesday to Britain, where a team of experts will examine them.

From Eindhoven, the bodies will be driven in a convoy of hearses to a military barracks near the town of Hilversum, where forensics experts will begin the painstaking work of putting names to the bodies, a process which could take months.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was unclear how many bodies had been transported to Kharkiv and how may have been left behind at the crash site.

Rutte, thrust into an unaccustomed spotlight, said on Tuesday the disaster had fundamentally changed the way the Dutch view Russia, urging the European Union to unite behind a firm approach to force Moscow to cooperate with the probe.

Rutte has spoken almost daily with US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other European leaders to coordinate the return of the bodies and discuss the investigation and the consequences.

The loss of life has few parallels in recent Dutch history. More than 200 Dutch citizens died in the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, in which two fully-loaded Boeing 747s collided on the ground with the loss of 583 lives, the world's worst civil aviation disaster.

The worst post-war disaster in the Netherlands occurred in 1953, when the North Sea flooded low-lying eastern areas one stormy night, sweeping over dikes to take more than 1,800 lives.