MH17 wreckage arrives in The Netherlands yesterday. Source: AFP

Flight 17 was shot down on July 17 over territory held by pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard — most of them Dutch, but including 38 Australians. Hunks of the wreckage arrived yesterday in The Netherlands by truck.

A law firm representing 20 family members of victims has criticised the Dutch investigation as too slow and bureaucratic and urged Prime Minister Mark Rutte to turn the job over to the UN.

The government’s top security official replied that investigators were doing their best while facing a “complex geopolitical situation in a conflict zone”. “We are doing what we can, and we do it every day anew,” Security and Counterterrorism Co-ordinator Dick Schoof said.

International teams seeking to retrieve human remains and ­salvage evidence have had difficulty reaching the crash site due to clashes between Ukrainian and rebel forces. Six victims have yet to be identified.

The Dutch Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, said in a preliminary report in September that the plane was brought down by “high-energy objects from outside the aircraft”.

That vague formulation has left the door open for confusion. A high-ranking rebel officer has ­acknowledged that rebels shot down the plane with a ground-to-air missile after mistaking it for a Ukrainian military plane. Russian media, however, claim the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian jet.

The Safety Board’s final report may rule out one or the other scenario but it will not seek to ­attribute responsibility.

Dutch prosecutors are co-­ordinating a criminal probe into the downing but have yet to name suspects or say when or how charges might be brought. “It is of the ­utmost importance that the independent investigations indisp­utably determine what happened and that no one can dispute the conclusions … or say that The Netherlands as leader gave cause to doubt the independence of the investigation,” Mr Schoof wrote.

Bob van der Goen, of the law firm Van Der Goen Advocaten, said the Dutch performance “has been terribly amateurish”, citing investigators’ late arrival at the crash site and a failure to interview witnesses in Ukraine. “I can understand keeping the investigation confidential so that you don’t release partial results,” he said. “What I don’t understand is secrecy about what it is you’re undertaking.”

Safety Board chief Tjibbe Joustra said investigators would photograph and categorise the wreckage at the Gilze-Rijen military base, then reassemble part of the Boeing 777. “It will take several months before we have a reconstruction,” he said.

AP