Rebels in control at crash site
Print Edition
A REBEL group in Ukraine said yesterday it was keeping what it presumed were the black boxes from the downed Malaysian airliner in the eastern city of Donetsk, but would need experts to confirm that they were the plane’s flight recorders.
Ukrainian officials feared that the black boxes, which when opened could offer an insight into the last moments of the flight, might be handed over to Russia or tampered with by the rebels who Kiev says are trying to destroy evidence of their, and Moscow’s, involvement in the downing of the plane.
Moscow and the pro-Russia rebels deny playing any role in the disaster, which killed all 298 people on the plane.
“Some items, presumably the black boxes, were found, and they have been delivered to Donetsk and they are under our control,” Aleksander Borodai, prime minister of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, told a news conference yesterday. “There are no specialists among us who could pinpoint the look of the black boxes, but we brought to Donetsk some technical items which could be the black boxes of the airliner.”
He said they would be handed over to international experts, when they arrived, and reiterated that the rebels did not have the technical capability to hit a plane flying at an altitude of more than 10,000 meters.
Meanwhile, rebels in eastern Ukraine yesterday took full control of the bodies recovered from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, as European leaders issued a strong call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to make sure international investigators had full access to the crash site.
The key question of who controlled the collection of evidence at the site in rebel-held territory dominated the day’s rapid-fire developments.
International monitors said armed rebels have limited their access to the crash site and Ukrainian officials said armed rebels took the bodies away from their workers by force.
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.
Borodai said the bodies recovered from the crash site would remain in refrigerated train cars in the rebel-held town of Torez, 15 kilometers from the crash site, until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.
“The bodies will go nowhere until experts arrive,” he said, adding that he was disappointed at how long the team of 12 Malaysian experts he was expecting had taken to arrive.
The leaders of France, Germany and Britain issued a statement demanding that Putin make sure pro-Russia rebels in Ukraine give full access to investigators at the crash site or risk the ire of Europe.
French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that Putin should force rebels 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 tomorrow.
The US embassy in Kiev issued a strong statement yesterday pointing to Russian complicity in arming the rebels, saying it has concluded “that flight MH17 was likely downed by a SA-11 surface-to-air missile from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine.”
It said that over the weekend of July 12-13, “Russia sent a convoy of military equipment with up to 150 vehicles, including tanks armored personnel carriers artillery, and multiple rockets launchers” to the separatists.
In a blistering article for the Sunday Times, Cameron called the attack a “direct result of Russia destabilizing a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias and training and arming them.”
“We must turn this moment of outrage into a moment of action,” the British leader wrote.
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