Black box flight recorders from the downed Air Malaysian plane have arrived for analysis by UK crash investigators.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said the black boxes had been delivered by Dutch safety authorities to the AAIB's headquarters at Farnborough in Hampshire.

The AAIB team will now go through the information from the cockpit voice recorder which will give them two hours of pilots' conversations as well as studying the contents of the flight data recorder (FDR).

It is thought that the AAIB will be able to send details of their findings to the Dutch within 24 hours - giving the experts in the Netherlands further information of the last moments of the doomed Boeing 777 as it fell to earth in eastern Ukraine.

As the UK investigators poured over the black boxes, bodies from the crash site were arriving in Netherlands where the country's king and queen were taking part in a national day of mourning.

King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima are in Eindhoven with relatives of the 298 people - including 10 Britons - killed in the disaster.

An unconfirmed number of bodies were released by the rebels yesterday and taken to the Ukrainian government-controlled city of Kharkiv by train.

Two military aircraft will fly some of them to Eindhoven this afternoon, where they will be met by the royals, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte and relatives.

The Netherlands government said a minute's silence will be held before a motorcade takes them to the Korporaal van Oudheusden barracks, where the process of identifying them will begin.

Mr Rutte has warned that it could take "weeks or even months" to identify all the victims.

The Dutch are leading the investigation into what happened to the Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight, at the request of the Ukrainian government.

A British team of police officers, led by the Metropolitan Police, will assist with victim identification in the Netherlands once bodies have arrived.

The EU has inched towards introducing economic sanctions against Vladimir Putin's Russian "cronies" in response to the passenger jet's downing by what is believed to have been a surface-to-air missile fired by the separatists that the Kremlin backs.

EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels agreed "concrete proposals" to draw up a list of the Russian president's associates who would be subject to punitive measures, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said.

The first names will be considered at a meeting where ministers will also look at broader sanctions such as arms embargoes and access to capital and hi-tech goods.

Prime Minister David Cameron has openly criticised a "reluctance" on the part of some European nations to take stronger action against Moscow, saying it would be "unthinkable" in the UK to go ahead with a French deal to sell helicopter carriers to Russia.

But MPs have warned that Britain is itself continuing to export tens of millions of pounds worth of arms and other dual-use military equipment to Russia.

The Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls said that 251 export licences for the sale to Russia of controlled goods worth at least £132 million remained in force.

Despite a promise in March by the then foreign secretary William Hague to stop military sales to Russia which could be used against Ukraine, it said that just 31 licences had been revoked or suspended while Russia had been removed as a permitted destination on three others.

The Conservatives are also facing calls from Labour to hand back more than £900,000 of donations from what the Opposition said were people with links to the Russian government or "who may be hit by the sorts of sanctions" sought by the PM.

The list includes £160,000 bid in an auction by the wife of a former minister in Mr Putin's government for a game of tennis with Mr Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Labour MP Sheila Gilmore said: "The Tories need to come clean about all their Russian links. There can be no impression of conflicts of interest or hypocrisy at such an important time."

A Conservative spokesman said: "All donations to the Conservative Party are fully and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission and published on their website."

Mr Johnson said that checks should be made on the bidder for the tennis match, and appeared to suggest it might not go ahead if her husband - Russian ex-finance minister Vladimir Chernukhin - turned out to be "an intimate or a crony" of Mr Putin's.

The mayor told Sky News: "I think you have to do stuff that actually hits Putin and his government where it hurts.

"I know about this tennis match they volunteered me for with some geezer. It is very important full checks are carried out to make sure this is not someone who is an intimate or a crony."

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