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             Australia to Send 100 More Officers to MH17 Crash Site

   by VOA News

   Australia is close to finalilzing a plan to send 100 additional police
   and some defense force personnel to Europe to join a planned Dutch-led
   international security force to secure the Malaysia Airlines Flight
   MH17 crash site, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Friday.

   Armed pro-Russian separatists control the area and have hampered
   investigators' attempts to access the site.

   The Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers, some of whom will be
   armed, will join a contingent of 90 AFP officers already in London
   waiting for a deal with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to be
   approved by the country's parliament.

   Abbott stressed that the team, which would include countries that lost
   citizens in the disaster, would not be going in as part of a military
   mission.

   "This is a humanitarian mission, with a clear and simple objective,"
   Abbott told reporters. "I expect the operation on the ground in
   Ukraine, should the deployment go ahead, to last no longer than a few
   weeks."

   Search and recovery

   The international police team would be tasked with ensuring a thorough
   search of the site so all remains are recovered and sent to the
   Netherlands for identification. The mission would be complete within a
   few weeks of arriving, Abbott told the Associated Press.

   Abbott announced on Thursday that 50 police officers had been deployed
   to London ahead of the mission, but a police spokeswoman said on Friday
   that the number was 90. It was unclear why the discrepancy had
   occurred.

   On Tuesday, Abbott said that Russian-backed rebels were tampering with
   evidence on "an industrial scale" and argued that outside police or
   possibly military forces were needed to ensure that did not continue.

   The Boeing 777 was shot down last week in eastern Ukraine en route from
   Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 passengers and crew on
   board. Twenty eight Australians were killed.

   The urgency to secure the area grew after three Australian officials
   traveled to the crash site on Thursday and found more wreckage and
   human remains, Abbott said.

   "With these remains exposed to the ravages of heat and animals and to
   the continuing possibility of human interference, it's more important
   than ever that the site be properly secured," Abbott told AP. "Our
   objective is the remains can be recovered, that the investigation can
   go ahead and that justice can be done."

   Ukrainian offensive

   Elsewhere, the French news agency AFP reported Ukrainian troops have
   retaken the strategically important city of Lysychansk in eastern
   Ukraine, as they press on with their offensive to stamp out a
   pro-Russian rebellion,  Poroshenko said.

   "Ukrainian forces have raised the flag over the town council in
   Lysychansk," the presidency said in a statement late Thursday.

   Lysychansk - a city of around 105,000 some 90 kilometers northwest of
   the rebel stronghold of Luhansk - was seized by separatists in early
   April at the start of a bloody insurgency that has now claimed the
   lives of some 1,000 people, including the nearly 300 on board downed
   Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, AFP reported.

   Some information for this report provided by Reuters and AP.

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References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/australia-to-send-100-more-officers-to-crash-site/1964909.html