Latest news and developments from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 disaster

She achieved a major win for Australia at the UN this morning, but that doesn’t mean Julie Bishop is a household name internationally just yet. Picture: Gary Ramage Source: News Corp Australia

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott says the MH17 crash scene has been severely tampered with and “after the crime comes the cover-up”. 

              

Mr Abbott told a media conference this afternoon an Australian military plane would be used to transport MH17 victims to the Netherlands where they would be identified — beginning a process he hoped would mean they were returned to their loved ones.

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He said it would be a slow process and it was important to take care so the right remains of the victims went where they were supposed to.

“As frustrating as this is, we do have to get it right. It would be terrible to compound families’ grief by risking the misidentification of their loved ones.”

He was more optimistic today about, “how things might turn out” but cautioned there was still much work to be done.

Much of that depended on Russian President Vladmir Putin honouring his word to allow a full and fair investigation.

So far, the scene had been subjected to an “industrial” size tampering and “after the crime comes the cover-up”, the Prime Minister said.

“This site has been trampled from the beginning ... Random individuals roaming around the site ... The more recent footage looks more like a building demolition than a forensic investigation.”

Although he believed the best security for the site would be from the countries who have lost citizens, he would not commit defence force staff or AFP officers to the task — but equally didn’t rule out Australian forces joining a multinational team later.

“A multinational police force or a multinational force of some kind is not something that can be just summoned up in a matter of a few hours.”

He would not discuss details of his conversations with world leaders on the matter of crash scene security.

Despite the tampering and contamination he was confident there was an “enormous amount” of evidence of MH17’s final moments — and the weapon that brought it down — that could still be found.

Mr Abbott said his determination, and that of the Government’s, was driven by “doing the right thing” by the Australian victims and their families who were suffering “almost unimaginable grief”.