The first bodies of the MH17 crash have arrived in the Netherlands

The bodies of the first victims from a Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine last week arrived on Wednesday at a military base in the Netherlands, a nation in shock and sorrow.

The bodies were taken by refrigerated rail earlier in the week to Kharkiv, then flown out of Ukraine by two military transport aircraft, one Dutch and one Australian, following a brief farewell ceremony.

A Dutch Hercules C-130 that Dutch government spokesman Lodewijk Hekking said was carrying 16 coffins was closely followed by an Australian C-17 Globemaster plane carrying 24 coffins.

Bells pealed and flags flew at half mast in memory of the 298 people killed when flight MH17 came down in an area of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists, in the first national day of mourning since wartime Queen Wilhelmina died in 1962. King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined dignitaries on the tarmac as two military aircraft carrying 40 plain wooden coffins landed at Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands.

“Think of all the people who were flying away on holiday, all the young people who had just finished their final school exams,” Jikkie van der Giessen, of Amsterdam, told Reuters. “They were looking fully toward the future and then you’re shot down. Whether it was an accident or on purpose, the fact is it’s horrible.”

The remains arrived Wednesday afternoon at an air base in the city of Eindhoven. The flights were met by Dutch King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima, Prime Minister Mark Rutte and other government officials.

Many of the passengers on the flight to Kuala Lumpur were tourists, but at least six were AIDS experts on their way to a conference in Melbourne, Australia on the deadly disease.

Representatives of the many countries whose citizens died in the crash were present at the airfield, including the governor-general of Australia, Peter Cosgrove. Their flags lined the airfield at half-mast on a cloudless day.

For one grieving mother, the arrival of the bodies marked a new stage of mourning and brought to an end the pain of seeing television images of victims lying in the undulating fields or in body bags being loaded into a train.

“If I have to wait five months for identification, I can do it,” Silene Fredriksz-Hoogzand, whose son, Bryce, and his girlfriend Daisy Oehlers died in the crash, said before setting off for Eindhoven. “Waiting while the bodies were in the field and in the train was a nightmare.” Read more about the story here.