Pro-Russia rebels seize bodies recovered from jet
TOREZ, UKRAINE — Rebels in eastern Ukraine took control Sunday of the bodies recovered from downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and the U.S. and European leaders demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin make sure rebels give international investigators full access to the crash site.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Ukraine’s separatists were to blame for the downing of the aircraft, adding there was “extraordinary circumstantial evidence” that showed Russia was almost certainly complicit in arming the rebels.
“There’s a stacking up of evidence here, which Russia needs to help account for. We are not drawing the final conclusion here. But there is a lot that points at the need for Russia to be responsible,” Kerry said on NBC’s Meet the Press television show.
The key question of who controlled the collection of evidence at the sprawling crash site in rebel-held territory dominated the day’s rapid- fire developments. International monitors say armed rebels have limited their access to the crash site and Ukrainian officials said armed rebels took the bod- ies away from their workers by force.
Ukraine and the separatists accuse each other of firing a surface-to-air missile Thursday at Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur some 33,000 feet above the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Both deny shooting down the plane. All those onboard the flight — 283 passengers and 15 crew — were killed.
A wave of international outrage over how the bodies of the plane crash victims were being handled came amid fears that the armed rebels who control the crash site could be tampering with the evidence.
Donetsk rebel leader Alexander Borodai said the bodies recovered from the crash site would remain in four refrigerated train cars in the rebel-held town of Torez, 15 kilometres from the crash site, until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.
“The bodies will go nowhere until experts arrive,” Borodai said, speaking in the rebel-held city of Donetsk.
He also said the plane’s black boxes have been recovered and will be handed over to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Borodai said he was expecting a team of 12 Malaysian experts and that he was disappointed at how long they had taken to arrive.
Ukrainian government officials, meanwhile, prepared a disaster crisis centre in the government-held city of Kharkiv, expecting to receive the bodies, but those hopes appeared delayed or even dashed Sunday.
Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said 192 bodies and eight body parts were loaded onto the railway cars.
The leaders of France, Germany and Britain issued a statement demanding that Putin make sure that pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine give full access to investigators at the Malaysian plane crash site or risk the ire of Europe.
French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron agreed Sunday to demand that Putin force separatists controlling the site to “finally allow rescuers and investigators to have free and total access to the zone.”
A statement from Hollande’s office said if Russia fails “to immediately take the needed measures, consequence will be drawn” at an EU foreign ministers meeting Tuesday.
Ukraine says Russia has been sending sophisticated arms to the rebels, a charge that Moscow denies.
The U.S. embassy in Kyiv issued a statement Sunday saying it has concluded that Flight 17 “was likely downed by a SA-11 surface-to-air missile from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine.” It said over the weekend of July 12-13, “Russia sent a convoy of military equipment with up to 150 vehicles, including tanks armoured personnel carriers, artillery, and multiple rockets launchers” to the separatists. The statement also said Russia was training separatist fighters in southwest Russia, including on air defence systems.
The rebels have been limiting the movements of international monitors and journalists at the crash site, which is near the Russian border. Associated Press journalists saw reeking bodies baking in the summer heat Saturday, piled into body bags by the side of the road or still sprawled where they landed in the verdant farmland in eastern Ukraine after their plane was shot out of the sky.
By Sunday morning, AP journalists saw no bodies and no armed rebels at the crash site. Emergency workers were searching the sprawling fields only for body parts. Heavy machinery was seen moving plane debris around.
There was no immediate word on the bodies of the 102 other plane victims, but Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said some have likely been incinerated without a trace.
“We’re looking at the field where the engines have come down. This was the area which was exposed to the most intense heat. We do not see any bodies here. It appears that some have been vaporized,” he told reporters in Kyiv on Sunday.
Nataliya Khuruzhaya, a duty officer at the train station in Torez, said emergency workers loaded plane victims’ bodies Sunday into four sealed, refrigerated train cars. Adding to growing claims pro-Russian rebels have attempted to interfere with evidence, Ukraine’s security services released on Sunday purported intercepts of phone conversations between rebel militants discussing the location of the plane’s black boxes.
In one exchange, a man identified as the leader of the rebel Vostok Battalion Alexander Khodakovsky states that two recording devices are being held by the head of intelligence of the insurgency’s military commander. The commander is then heard to order the militiaman to ensure no outsiders get hold of any material.
The man identified as Khodakovsky says he is pursuing inquiries about the black boxes under instructions from “our high-placed friends ... in Moscow.”
The security service says all the recordings were made on Friday.