New video of MH17 downing emerges

Four months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine, a video has emerged that shows how close the burning passenger jet came to hitting village homes and suggests that residents first assumed it was a Ukrainian military plane that had been struck.

The amateur footage, filmed by a resident of Hrabove, shows people reacting in alarm as wreckage blazes only a few metres away from their homes on the afternoon of July 17.

The video is perhaps the first taken immediately after the plane came down.

All 298 people, including 38 Australian citizens and residents, aboard the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed when it was shot down over a rebel-held area.

Workers on Sunday began collecting debris from the crash site, under the supervision of Dutch investigators and officials from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"If circumstances permit, work will restart tomorrow. We expect that the gathering up and removal of debris will take a number of days," said a statement from the Dutch Safety Board.

The recovered fragments will be loaded onto trains and taken to the government-controlled eastern city of Kharkiv.

The ultimate cause of the MH17 disaster is the subject of major diplomatic disputes. Ukraine and Western government say Russia-backed separatist fighters fired the rockets that felled the plane, while state-run television in Moscow over the weekend produced evidence it claims places blame with Ukraine's air force.

In the video obtained on Sunday by AP, residents of the village of Hrabove can be heard asking about the whereabouts of the pilot. This is significant because multiple Ukrainian military planes had been shot down by this time, and their pilots and crew regularly taken prisoner by rebel forces.

The afternoon that MH17 was brought down, LifeNews reported unnamed rebel sources as saying another Ukrainian transport plane has been downed. Other pro-Kremlin media issued similar reports. They quickly dropped that account as it became evident that a civilian aircraft had in fact been brought down.

The reaction of villagers in the new video suggests their immediate assessment too was that another Ukrainian plane had been struck.

One person can be heard to say: "And where is the pilot?"

In another exchange, a person is heard questioning whether more than one plane had crashed, since there was so much debris. People around him quickly correct him to say only one aircraft had come down.

The account favoured by most Western governments is that the plane was brought down by an SA-11 missile launcher fired by rebels.

US government officials have said the Russians might have provided technical help to the rebels to operate the system.

The separatists have denied any involvement in shooting down the plane.