Search among the sunflowers

It’s 17 July 2014. Jack O’Brien races through Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, desperate not to miss his flight home to Sydney – Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. A few hours later, Jack’s flight would break apart in mid-air above conflict-stricken eastern Ukraine. The plane plunged into a sea of sunflowers, killing all 298 people aboard. Jack would never make it home. As the heart-wrenching news reached Jack’s family and the relatives of other victims, Australian officials embarked on an urgent mission to find the truth of what happened. It would become one of the most complex and dangerous international policing missions of our time.

In the days after MH17 came down, unarmed AFP officers were dispatched into a tense and active conflict zone controlled by pro-Russian separatists. Their mission involved recovering the remains of the MH17 victims. What confronted them was a horrifying scene. Bodies, personal belongings and children’s toys lay alongside smoking debris as far as the eye could see. With it looking less like an accident and more like a criminal act, the MH17 crash had just become the world’s biggest crime scene.

Brisbane retirees Howard and Susan Horder were on their way home following a dream European holiday. They were 2 of the 38 Australians on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 when it was shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine. The devastation of that day has never left the Horder family. While they and other heartbroken next of kin were desperate to bring their loved ones home, AFP officers were working quickly on the ground in Ukraine to recover bodies from the volatile crash site and move them to a safe location so disaster victim identification experts could begin the painstaking identification process.

With the threat of conflict resuming at any moment, it was a race against time for AFP investigators to secure evidence that would help identify the last remaining MH17 victims and bring them closer to the truth of exactly what happened ... and who was responsible. At the crash site, investigators uncovered a bow-tie-shaped fragment of what appeared to be shrapnel, embedded in the plane’s fuselage. It would be a critical discovery in the MH17 investigation amid a climate of mounting political pressure on Russia.

As debris from MH17 still smouldered across the fields of eastern Ukraine, families and next of kin were thrust into a new reality – one marked by profound loss and unimaginable grief. While the world around them moved forward, their lives had been forever altered and they wanted someone held responsible. Justice would be an arduous 8-and-a-half-year journey and the AFP would not let them go through it alone. The AFP’s Family Investigative Liaison Officers (FILO) would become a lifeline for grieving Australian families, providing support and a single point of truth against a background of complex misinformation.