MH17 crash: Dutch police officer arrested after allegedly selling souvenirs from tragic flight

A Dutch police officer has been arrested after allegedly selling souvenirs online believed to have come from the wreckage of flight MH17. The plane was shot down over east Ukraine last year, killing all 298 people on board.

In a statement on 29 November, Dutch police said that a man had been arrested for "embezzlement" and had tried to sell a "piece of clothing he had used at the crash site" when teams of investigators were gathering evidence to establish what brought the plane down while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia.

The man was also alleged to have tried to sell a packet of Malaysian airlines tissues taken from the crash site, and another unknown object that has not been officially identified. Dutch website Marktplaats where the items were listed said it had removed the links.

Dutch television station NOS reported that the man had tried to sell the items for €1,500 ($1,600; £1066), and described them as a "wall decoration" made from clothing worn by crash site investigators, the tissues, and a piece of the plane's hull.

Police are attempting to establish if the items were in fact taken from the crash site.

Most of the passengers who were killed in the crash were Dutch, and investigators from the Netherlands-led inquiry believe that the plane was downed by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile fired from an area controlled by pro-Moscow militants.