After Samira Calehr hugged her sons goodbye at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, 11-year-old Miguel Panduwinata whirled around and ran back, throwing his arms around his mother.
“Mama, I’m going to miss you,” he said. “What will happen if the airplane crashes?”
It was the latest of series of questions the boy had asked about death, his soul and God in the days leading up to the trip to visit his grandmother in Indonesia. What was this all about? Calehr wondered.
“Don’t say that,” she said, squeezing him. “Everything will be OK.”
Older brother Shaka tried to reassure her. “I will take care of him,” he told his mother. “He’s my baby.”
She watched the two boys walk away. But Miguel kept looking back, sadness in his big brown eyes.
A few hours later, he, his brother and 296 other passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were gone, their Boeing 777 apparently blasted from the sky by a high-flying missile over war-torn eastern Ukraine.
On Wednesday, as a military trumpet sounded in tribute, the first bodies of victims from the July 17 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash arrived back in the Netherlands after an airborne journey from Ukraine.
Sixteen coffins were aboard a Dutch military flight and 24 aboard an Australian jet, both of which left the northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv after a solemn ceremony. They landed a few hours later at Amsterdam’s small Eindhoven airport to a somber reception from King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima, Prime Minister Mark Rutte and others.
Black hearses pulled up on the tarmac to receive the coffins. A moment of silence was observed.
Wednesday was an official day of mourning in the Netherlands, with bells tolling throughout the country. Flags on all Dutch government buildings and diplomatic missions around the world were ordered to fly at half staff.
From Eindhoven, the bodies were to be flown to an army barracks in the town of Hilversum, about 20 miles from the Dutch capital, where the process of identifying the remains will get underway.
In Kharkiv, Ukrainian soldiers lined the runway as the coffins were carried onto the Dutch military plane, and government officials from several countries offered short speeches.
“Today, your journey home begins,” said Hans Docter, a representative from the Dutch government.
More planes are scheduled to arrive in Ukraine today, with the goal of transporting all recovered bodies to the Netherlands by Friday.
In the Netherlands, home to 193 of the victims, families of passengers moved to a new stage of grief as the bodies, many badlty decomposed after days of laying in sweltering fields, began arriving.
“If I have to wait five months for identification, I can do it,” said Silene Fredriksz-Hoogzand, whose son, Bryce, and his girlfriend Daisy Oehlers died in the crash. “Waiting while the bodies were in the field and in the train was a nightmare.”
In a lab in southern England on Wednesday, investigators began studying the plane’s black boxes in hopes of learning about the its final minutes. The Dutch Safety Board, which has taken control of the investigation, said the cockpit voice recorder suffered damage but showed no sign of manipulation, and its recordings were intact.
In Ukraine, the rebels attacked two Ukrainian air force jets in the same area where the passenger plane fell.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said the Su-25s were shot down about 20 miles south of the site where the wreckage from the Malaysian jet fell. The separatist group Donetsk People’s Republic said on its website that one of the pilots was killed and another was being sought by rebel fighters.
The attack revived questions about the rebels’ weapons and how much support and training they are getting from Russia. The U.S. accuses Russia of backing the separatists and fueling Ukraine’s conflict, which has brought Russia’s relations with the West and its key trading partners in Europe to a two-decade low.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the downing of the fighter jets “speaks to the pattern we’ve seen over the last several weeks, which is Russian-backed separatists armed with Russian anti-aircraft posing risk to aircraft in Ukraine.”
Rhodes added: “The only aircraft they’re not taking responsibility for is” the Malaysian jetliner.
In Amsterdam, Calehr wondered if she, too, was to blame for dismissing her son’s apparent premonition.
“I should have listened to him,” she says softly. “I should have listened to him.”
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