DOZENS of villagers carried flowers and lit candles on Sunday at the site in rebel-held eastern Ukraine where flight MH17 crashed two years ago, killing all 298 people on board. About 60 people joined the vigil on the small square of the village of Petropavlivka where some of the remains and personal belongings of passengers on the Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur fell to the ground in 2014.

“Some of the relatives of people who were killed phoned us and asked us to find things that were valuable for them, for example, the toys that belonged to children aboard,” said village council head Natalia Voloshina. Local residents continue to find small fragments of the jet’s wreckage in the nearby forests, she said. Some of the small pieces of wreckage that have not yet been handed over to Dutch investigators were stacked outside Voloshina’s office to mark the anniversary. The majority of the dead were Dutch citizens and many relatives are planning legal action against the airline and others they blame for the downing of MH17, including separatists and their backers.

In October, an international inquiry concluded that the Boeing 777 was shot down on July 17, 2014 by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile fired from a zone held by pro-Russian separatists. But the investigation stopped short of saying who was responsible for the jet downing, and initial findings of a Dutch criminal inquiry into who shot down the plane are expected to be presented in early autumn.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Sunday vowed that “the perpetrators of this tragedy must be punished”. The separatist authorities deny responsibility, saying that Ukrainian forces were to blame for the attack.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2016