A year on, Ukrainian villagers recall horrors of MH17 crash

TO GO WITH STORY Ukraine MH17 Memories - In this photo taken on Friday, July 10, 2015, Alexander Borodai, former head of the rebel government in eastern Ukraine, speaks to the Associated Press in Moscow, Russia. It is now one year since Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 disintegrated and local residents remember the bodies and debris falling from the sky. In his first Western media interview since he left Ukraine in October, Borodai, goes through the motions, dismissing eye-witness reports and photographic evidence as fakes, but he admits the separatists had no idea that civilian planes were allowed to fly over the war zone. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr.) TO GO WITH STORY Ukraine MH17 Memories - In this photo taken on Friday, July 10, 2015, Alexander Borodai, former head of the rebel government in eastern Ukraine, speaks to the Associated Press in Moscow, Russia. It is now one year since Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 disintegrated and local residents remember the bodies and debris falling from the sky. In his first Western media interview since he left Ukraine in October, Borodai, goes through the motions, dismissing eye-witness reports and photographic evidence as fakes, but he admits the separatists had no idea that civilian planes were allowed to fly over the war zone. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr.)

By Associated Press July 16, 2015 4 min read

HRABOVE, Ukraine (AP) – The field outside Hrabove, littered one year ago with bodies and smelling of burnt flesh and plastic, now smells of wild flowers.

But the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 still haunts residents, who remember the bodies that fell from the sky above their sleepy village in eastern Ukraine.

“People came out of their houses to see a boy without the head, who was lying there” on the street, recalled villager Nadezhda Tsyb. “Then I saw a girl: she was coming down from the sky, whirling in the air, then she fell into my neighbor’s vegetable patch.”

All 298 people onboard MH17 were killed when the plane was downed on July 17, 2014, over rebel-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, where government forces and the Russia-backed separatists had been fighting for months. Ukrainian and Western officials said the plane was shot down by a rebel missile, most likely by mistake, and that Russia supplied the weapon or trained rebels to use it. Both the rebels and Moscow denied that.

A preliminary report released in the Netherlands last year said the plane had no technical problems in the seconds before it broke up in the sky after being struck by multiple “high-energy objects from outside the aircraft,” which could have been a missile.