The team of experts in Ukraine making a new effort to recover human remains and wreckage from flight MH17 have ended their search.

‘We have done everything humanly possible,’ team leader Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg told news agency ANP on Thursday.

The 30-strong team, which includes people from Australia and Malaysia, have recovered a large number of personal possessions, body parts and pieces of wreckage from areas of the crash site considered too dangerous to approach during earlier search missions.

Aalbersberg said he is ‘very hopeful’ that the finds will allow the final two victims of the MH17 crash to be identified.

Missile

MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was brought down in July last year, apparently by a missile fired by pro-Russian rebels. All 298 people on board, most of them Dutch, were killed.

The body parts in up to seven coffins will be transferred to a Dutch military plane at the Ukraine city of Charkov on Saturday and flown to the Netherlands.

On arrival at Eindhoven airport, they will be received in the same solemn ceremony as at seven previous events. The coffins will then be taken in a slow procession to Hilversum where the remains will be identified by forensic experts.