Bodies ‘stolen in bid to hide the evidence’
THREE dozen bodies from the Malaysia Airlines crash site have been ‘stolen’ by armed pro-Russian rebels, Ukrainian officials claimed yesterday amid concerns that evidence is being tampered with.
The officials said the corpses, some of which may show evidence of a missile attack, had been driven by truck to a heavily guarded forensic laboratory in insurgent-controlled Donetsk.
The officials also alleged that rebels had moved cranes on to the site of the crash and had been taking away parts of the aircraft.
The accusations came amid a growing propaganda war of claims and counter-claims and followed protests by the Kiev authorities that their efforts to search for bodies and investigate the crash were being seriously hampered.
A spokesman for the regional administration, which has lost control of much of the Donetsk region, said: ‘Armed rebels pushed away the rescue team and took away all their means of communication.
‘The bodies were loaded into the trucks just like bags. Obviously, the terrorists are going to block the investigation. There is no moral approval for such an action.’
The temperature was further raised by the head of the Ukrainian SBU secret service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who directly accused Russian military personnel of pressing the button on the BUK surface-to-air missile that brought down the Malaysian plane.
‘This terrorist act was performed with the help of three Russian military men,’ he said in a television interview in Kiev.
The Russian media was also in full propaganda mode with the main channels repeatedly blaming the Ukrainians for the crash, arguing that however the jet had been downed, the attack was likely to have been orchestrated by the United States.