Monitors given limited access to crash site
Print Edition
UKRAINE and pro-Russia insurgents yesterday agreed to set up a security zone around the crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
International monitors said yesterday they were allowed to visit more of the site though gunmen still stopped them approaching some of the wreckage.
In sometimes tense scenes with pro-Russia rebels clearly uncomfortable at having observers and the press at the scene, a top official at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said access had improved since they arrived on Friday.
“We have now had the possibility to see a bit more of this rather large scene. We have observed the situation here as it was presented to us. We also had the possibility to speak to those who are in charge here, and ... to speak to the inhabitants of a local village,” said Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine.
“As in any job, the cooperation improves over time ... we had better access today,” he told reporters.
More investigators arrived overnight from the Netherlands and Malaysia amid calls for access to the scene.
Rebels remain in control of the area and have shown few signs of being ready to cooperate with an investigation that could blame them for attacking the jet.
The agreement to set up a buffer zone came only after two days of intense international mediation and has yet to be fully put to the test. The fields are littered with the remains of scarred bodies and personal effects of 298 people whose lives were cut short.
The head of the Ukrainian Security Service said the OSCE-mediated talks “concluded with an agreement to set up a 20-kilometer security zone so that Ukraine could fulfil the most important thing — identify the bodies (and) hand them over to relatives.”
But the pro-Kiev administration of the Donetsk Province where the flight came down said militias in the area had “stolen the bodies of 36 victims (and) loaded them onto trucks as if they were sacks.”
There was no independent confirmation of the claim, however, or explanation from the local authorities as to why the rebels would remove bodies from the scene.
United States President Barack Obama and other world leaders now agree that the Malaysia Airlines jet was blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-controlled territory.
Kiev went further by accusing militias of using a Russia-supplied Buk system to down the jet. But Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the tragedy on Kiev’s three-month military campaign against the fighters and called for a probe that could explain why the jet was flying over a combat zone.
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