Grim search of crash site begins
Print Edition
EMERGENCY workers, police officers and even off-duty coal miners spread out yesterday across the sunflower fields and villages of eastern Ukraine, searching the wreckage of a Malaysia Airlines jet shot down as it flew miles above the country’s battlefield.
The attack on Thursday afternoon killed 298 people from nearly a dozen nations, including vacationers, students and a large contingent of scientists heading to an AIDS conference in Australia.
At least 189 of the dead were from the Netherlands.
Intelligence authorities from the United States said a surface-to-air missile brought down flight MH17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, but they did not speculate on who fired it.
The Ukrainian government in Kiev, the separatist pro-Russia rebels they are fighting and the Russian government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all denied shooting the plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.
After holding an emergency session, the United Nations Security Council called for “a full, thorough and independent international investigation” into the downing of the plane.
Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday called for a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine and urged the two sides to hold peace talks as soon as possible.
A day earlier, he had blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry released a video purporting to show a truck carrying the Buk missile launcher it said was used to fire on the plane with one of its four missiles apparently missing.
Leaders of the rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic denied any involvement and said a Ukrainian air force jet had brought down flight MH17.
Russia’s Defense Ministry later pointed the finger at Ukrainian ground forces, saying it had picked up radar activity from a Ukrainian missile system south of Donetsk when the airliner was brought down. The Ukrainian security council, however, said no missiles had been fired from its armories.
The Ukrainian government also released recordings it said were of Russian intelligence officers discussing the shooting down of an airliner by rebels who might have mistaken it for a military plane.
There were no survivors from the crash, the deadliest such attack on a commercial plane, which scattered bodies across miles of rebel-held territory.
Makeshift white flags marked where bodies lay in corn fields and among the debris. Others, stripped bare by the force of the crash, had been covered by polythene sheeting weighed down by stones, one marked with a flower in remembrance.
A pensioner told how a corpse smashed though the roof of her house.
“There was a howling noise ... then objects started falling out of the sky,” said Irina Tipunova, 65. “And then I heard a roar and she landed in the kitchen.”
By midday, 181 bodies had been located, according to emergency workers in contact with officials in Kiev.
In addition to the Dutch, passengers on the plane included 29 Malaysians, 28 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos and one person each from Canada, New Zealand and China, according to the airlines and governments.
Still Nataliya Bystro, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s emergency services, said rebel militiamen were interfering with the recovery operation. She did not elaborate.
Rebels who control the crash site issued conflicting reports about whether they had found the plane’s black boxes or not.
“No black boxes have been found ... we hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened,” said separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai.
Earlier in the day, an aide to the military leader of Borodai’s group said authorities had recovered eight of 12 recording devices. As planes usually have two black boxes it was not clear what he was referring to.
Borodai said 17 representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation and four Ukrainian experts had traveled into rebel-controlled areas to begin an investigation into the attack.
Ukraine’s aviation service yesterday closed the airspace over two regions gripped by separatist fighting and Russian airlines suspended all flights over Ukraine.
The cockpit and one turbine lay a kilometer apart, and the tail landed 10km away. A rebel militiaman said the plane’s fuselage showed signs of being hit by a projectile.
Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said the plane was hit by a missile from a Buk launcher. Malaysia’s prime minister said there was no distress call before the plane went down.
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