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Separatists Said to Seize Control of Crash Victims’ Remains Bodies From Malaysia Airlines Flight Are Stuck in Ukraine, Held Hostage Over Distrust
(about 7 hours later)
KIEV, Ukraine — Pro-Russian separatist militiamen have seized custody of the bodies of about 200 victims of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet that was blown out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday, and rebels continued to limit access to the crash site in eastern Ukraine, blocking the work of experts even as hundreds of untrained local volunteers were picking through the wreckage with sticks. TOREZ, Ukraine — Three wrenching days after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the bodies of most of those aboard have ended up here, in a fly-infested railway station in a rough coal-mining town in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian emergency responders, working under the watchful eyes of armed rebels, had recovered 196 bodies from the area where Flight 17, a Boeing 777 carrying 298 passengers and crew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed and burned on Thursday afternoon. For now, they are stuck, lying in five gray refrigerated train cars in this rebel-controlled war zone, hostages to high politics and mutual distrust.
But the responders were forced to turn the bodies over to the separatists, Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, said at a briefing in Kiev on Sunday. Mr. Lysenko said officials believed that 38 of those bodies were taken to the morgue in Donetsk, a regional capital that is controlled by separatists. The government in Kiev, sensing a moment to marshal international attention against rebels seeking to break away from Ukraine, has accused them of blocking access to the bodies and the crash site and delaying what is already a very painful process for the families of the dead.
Michael Bociurkiw, the leader of an observer mission from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.), said that most of the bodies had been placed in three refrigerated railroad cars in the town of Torez, not far from the crash site. He said that monitors were told that 167 bodies were in the cars, which were locked but under the control of rebels from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, one of the main separatist groups. The rebels insist they are cooperating, and say they want to turn the 247 bodies they had recovered as of Sunday over to international representatives. But they say those officials have not arrived because the Ukrainian government is frightening them from entering rebel territory.
Monitors were permitted to make a brief inspection, Mr. Bociurkiw said, speaking by phone from eastern Ukraine, and the body bags all appeared to have tags on them. “We were escorted to the railway station by heavily armed guards of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” he said. “They are the ones in charge of that area.” Neither of the conflicting story lines fully reflects the chaos at the scene, where an incoherent recovery effort is being carried out by motley groups of mostly well-meaning but untrained people. On Sunday, they included miners straight from their shifts; local residents who arrive on run-down motorbikes; and poorly equipped emergency service workers who sleep in the field, amid the stench of decay, in sagging orange and blue tents.
Large groups of searchers were working at the crash site, near the village of Grabovo, for the first time on Sunday. Coal miners and people in civilian clothes walked through wheat and corn fields, looking for those bodies that were still missing. Bodies were placed in black plastic bags and laid along the side of the road in matted grass. The prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, said Sunday that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was negotiating with rebels to move the bodies out of the conflict zone. “All efforts are focused on getting this train onto territory controlled by Ukrainian authorities,” Mr. Rutte said in Amsterdam, according to Reuters. He said a team of specialists was likely to enter the crash site on Monday in an effort to identify the bodies.
It was the first day of mass searching, a full three days after the plane was shot down. But for now, their train is going nowhere, a final indignity for families as they grieve over the loss of their loved ones. When asked Sunday afternoon where the train was headed, its driver said he had not been given a destination.
By midday, observers from the O.S.C.E. had arrived and were walking the crash site’s perimeter. Four Ukrainian investigators, who according to the O.S.C.E.'s security detail, had arrived from Kiev, were taking photographs in the burned area near the front of the site. They would not speak to journalists. “Nobody knows, and no one will say,” he said.
The chaos, delay and potential mishandling of evidence at the crash site, and the uncertainty over when relatives would be able to reclaim the remains of their loved ones, added a frustrating and emotionally wrenching dimension to the looming geopolitical confrontation over Russia’s possible role in the downing of the aircraft. The United States and Ukraine have criticized the rebels for what they say has been evidence of tampering and concealment at the crash site. But the chaos at the site may be as much a product of confusion and incompetence as anything.
Secretary of State John Kerry in a telephone conversation on Saturday with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, urged Russia to help control the situation at the crash scene and help put an end to the insurrection in east Ukraine by pressing rebels to lay down arms. Instead of a crime scene marked with police tape, helicopters scouring its 13 square miles and specialists poring over every detail with special equipment, the area was a post-Soviet free-for-all playing out in a war zone, where most of the trappings of a modern state have fallen away. With the police mostly gone, for example, militiamen now respond to traffic accidents.
“The Secretary particularly stressed the international call for investigators to receive full, immediate, and unfettered access to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site,” the State Department said, describing Mr. Kerry’s remarks, “This is a disaster like no other,” said Michael Bociurkiw, the spokesman for the European security agency mission. The standard response, he said, is, “You secure the area, and then you go about the established business.”
“The United States is also very concerned about reports that the remains of some victims and debris from the site are being tampered with or inappropriately removed from the site,” the department added. He added: “That hasn’t happened here. And whether they even have the ability for that to happen is unclear.”
In a statement on Saturday, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, whose country lost 193 of its citizens aboard the plane, urged the speedy return of bodies and expressed outrage at the lack of control over the site. At the crash site on Sunday, rescue workers picked through a charred pile of suitcases, mangled airplane seats, and bits of metal and clothing, using nothing but their hands and a few small sticks. Cows grazed in one of the fields near the fuselage. Army green stretchers made in 1959, some with dark splotches of blood, lay on the matted grasses near the road.
“Swift recovery of the victims’ remains is now an absolute necessity and our highest priority,” Mr. Rutte said in the statement. “I am shocked by the images of completely disrespectful behavior at this tragic place. In defiance of all the rules of proper investigation, people have evidently been picking through the personal and recognizable belongings of the victims. This is appalling.” “Body!” shouted one of the men who was wearing large, yellowish, mittenlike gloves and no mask. They dug harder, yanking unsuccessfully at a large hunk of metal that lay heavily on an unrecognizable body part.
Senior United States and Ukrainian officials have said they have conclusive evidence that the plane was shot down by a missile from a Russian antiaircraft system, fired from within rebel controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists have been battling government forces since April. A second asked for help. “There’s no one here,” said a third. A fourth asked: “Does anyone have a shovel?”
Officials said they had photographs and other intelligence showing that three Buk-M1 weapons systems, also known in the west as SA-11 Gadfly, were transported across the border into Russia early Friday morning, within hours after the civilian plane was destroyed. A rocket was missing from the back of one system, officials said. American intelligence officials have said a proper investigation could answer crucial questions about who is responsible for shooting down the plane, but the hopes for retrieving anything useful from the site are dwindling with each passing day.
Despite the increasing evidence of Russia’s involvement and widespread international outrage, neither the United States nor its allies in Europe have announced any response. Russia has denied any role in the incident, and the Kremlin in recent days has stated repeatedly that the Ukrainian military has antiaircraft capabilities that could have destroyed the plane. Two days after the crash, for example, potentially decisive evidence was lying, seemingly undiscovered, in a recently harvested field about five miles from the central crash site: a large curled sheet of metal, apparently part of the outside of the plane, that had multiple, even holes torn into it. A weapons expert who reviewed photographs said the holes were consistent with a blast from a missile of the type American officials believe brought down the plane.
The Ukrainian government has said that none of its surface-to-air missiles were in position in the area at the time, and none were fired – a point that was supported by the United States in a written assessment published by the State Department. Distrust poisoned the process. One rebel leader, Alexander Borodai, said Sunday that the plane’s flight recorder, which contains details about the plane’s status before it went down, had surfaced, but that he wanted to give it to international experts, not Ukrainians.
“Pro-Russian separatist fighters have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems and have downed more than a dozen aircraft over the past few months, including two large transport aircraft,” the State Department wrote. “At the time that flight MH17 dropped out of contact, we detected a surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch from a separatist-controlled area in southeastern Ukraine. We believe this missile was an SA-11.” Officials in Kiev have accused the rebels of trying to spirit the recorder to Moscow and released audio recordings that they claimed proved it. And Ukraine’s government said Sunday that it had captured 23 rebels who were all Russian passport holders. 
The assessment added, “Ukraine also operates SA-11 systems, but we are confident no Ukrainian air defense systems were within range of the crash. Ukrainian forces have also not fired a single surface-to-air missile during the conflict, despite often complaining about violations of their airspace by Russian military aircraft.” Nikolai, a coal mine worker, had driven 35 miners from their morning shift in a large, rusty white bus with blue stripes to help with the search. The miners walked seven in a line with an emergency worker, combing the fields for bodies and plane parts.
Mr. Lysenko, the spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that heavy fighting between rebels and government forces continued through Saturday night, with eight soldiers killed and 50 wounded in the last 24 hours – a stark reminder that the crash site is in what remains an active combat zone. Nikolai — who would give only his patronymic, Vasilievich, and not his last name — recently had his own tragedy. On Tuesday, a bomb hit his apartment building, killing his brother. Villagers blame the Ukrainian military, which they say was aiming at a nearby rebel base, though Ukraine denies that.
Mr. Lysenko said that Russia was continuing to supply tanks, weapons and other heavy equipment to rebels in the east, and he angrily dismissed a reported demand by some rebel leaders that a cease-fire be imposed before full access to the scene is granted. “Tomorrow he would have been 55,” Mr. Vasilievich said, eating seeds in the shade of his bus. He blames the Ukrainians for shooting down the passenger jet, a common sentiment here.
“If the terrorists wanted to get experts into the area for special investigations, they would have done this immediately after the arrival of such experts,” Mr. Lysenko said. “But the experts arrived, and still there was no cease-fire on the part of terrorists. So their statements on the conditions that they put forward have no grounds, whatsoever.” Ragtag rebels were mostly gone from the site on Sunday, though one who stood guard bemoaned the primitiveness of the operation. He told of a small pack of foxes that ran through the wreckage at night, attracted by the smell.
“They could have done it all with helicopters by now, flying over the fields,” said the rebel, who identified himself only as Vova, holding a rifle made in 1954. “Grief should bring people together,” he added.
Also gone was a trigger-happy rebel nicknamed Mosquito with a penchant for firing into the air when people disobeyed him. The European security agency monitors left the crash site on Friday after hearing shooting. But on Sunday they were walking unobstructed around the site, protected by guards, many of whom wore the blue camouflage pants and maroon berets of Ukraine’s disbanded special police.
One watched over the observers through new binoculars. Another nearby carried a new Dragunov sniper rifle. Four Ukrainian aviation experts were also working on site, though they declined to speak with journalists.
Since the crash on their doorsteps, villagers from Grabovo have gathered for prayers and laid flowers along the road. Yellow daisies rested on one piece of black metal at the site, and beside it lay a small stuffed doll in a purple dress, left as a tribute.
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine has claimed that rebels stole credit cards from the wreckage. One villager, Elena, who declined to give her last name, strongly disputed that.
“That is a sin, a big sin in our faith,” she said. “This is a cemetery. Who would take from it?”