International experts with sniffer dogs today recovered the remains of more victims from the downed Malaysia Airlines jet in east Ukraine despite shelling limiting access to some parts of the vast crash site.
Seventy Dutch and Australian police investigators spent the second day of their operation scouring more of the wreckage strewn over some 20 square kilometres (eight square miles), after only managing to screen a tiny patch previously.
"Today, because they had more time, the experts were able to comb through a bigger area. They again found human remains and personal belongings," Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch police mission said.
But while work continued undisturbed for the bulk of the experts, mortar fire forced a small team of investigators to hurriedly leave a village where more debris lay.
"We heard at a distance of approximately two kilometres incoming artillery from where we were and that was too close to continue," said Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Ukraine.
Government troops and pro-Moscow separatists battling across the war-torn region had pledged to halt fighting around the rebel-held site, where the plane was shot down over two weeks ago killing all 298 people on board.
The perilous security situation highlights the difficulties facing investigators as they try to recover remains and then puzzle together what happened, a grim task that those in charge say could take some three weeks.
The United States accuses insurgents of blowing the airliner out of the sky with a surface-to-air missile likely supplied by Russia, while Moscow and the rebels have pointed the finger at the Ukrainian military.
More than 220 coffins have already been sent back to the Netherlands, which lost 193 citizens in the July 17 crash, but more body fragments are still lying out in the cornfields where the plane came down.
The latest remains recovered are being sent to a waiting forensics team in the government-controlled city of Kharkiv by refrigerated van before being sent westwards, Dutch police said.
Across the rest of the region the violence that has claimed some 1,150 lives since mid-April raged on.
Ukraine's military said its positions continued to come under heavy fire and that separatists had hit an army drone with a missile similar to the one they say downed MH17.
