Official: 181 bodies found at Malaysian plane site
10:55 PM Friday Jul 18, 2014
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) Emergency workers, police officers and even
off-duty coal miners dressed in overalls and covered in soot spread
out across sunflower fields and tiny Ukrainian villages Friday,
searching through the wreckage of the Malaysian plane shot down as it
flew miles above the country's battlefield.
The downing killed
298 people from nearly a dozen nations. By midday, 181 bodies had been
located, according to emergency workers at the sprawling crash site.
Separatist
rebels who control the eastern area where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
was brought down Thursday said they had recovered most of its black
boxes and were considering what to do with them. Their statement had
profound implications for the integrity of the plane crash
investigation.
U.S. intelligence authorities said a surface-to-air missile downed the plane, but could not say who fired it.
Ukraine has called for an international probe to determine who attacked the plane and insisted it was not its military.
An
angry Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Friday demanded an
independent inquiry into the downing and called Russia's response to it
"deeply, deeply unsatisfactory."
"The initial response of the Russian ambassador was to blame
Ukraine for this and I have to say that is deeply, deeply
unsatisfactory," he said. "It's very important that we don't allow
Russia to prevent an absolutely comprehensive investigation so that we
can find out exactly what happened here."
"This is not an accident, it's a crime," he added.
The
crash site was spread out over fields between two villages in eastern
Ukraine Rozsypne and Hrabove and access to it remained difficult and
dangerous. The road from Donetsk, the largest city in the region, to the
crash site was marked by five rebel checkpoints Friday, with document
checks at each.
Fighting apparently still continued nearby. In
the distance, the thud of Grad missile launchers being fired could be
heard Friday morning.
In the sunflower fields around Rozsypne, 40
kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border, lines of men disappeared
into the thick and tall growth Friday. One fainted after finding a
body. Another body was covered in a coat.
In Hrabove, several
miles away, huge numbers of simple sticks, some made from tree branches,
were affixed with red or white rags to mark spots where body parts were
found.
Ukraine Foreign Ministry representative Andriy Sybiga
said 181 bodies had been found, citing local emergency workers at the
site. He said the bodies will be taken to Kharkiv, a
government-controlled city 270 kilometers (170 miles) to the north, for
identification.
Among the debris were watches and smashed mobile
phones, charred boarding passes and passports. An "I Love Amsterdam"
T-shirt and a guidebook to Bali hinted at holiday plans.
Large
chunks of the Boeing 777 that bore the airline's red, white and blue
markings lay strewn over one field. The cockpit and one turbine lay a
kilometer (a half-mile) apart, and residents said the tail landed
another 10 kilometers (six miles) away.
One rebel militiaman in
Rozsypne told The Associated Press that the plane's fuselage showed
signs of being struck by a projectile.
The area has seen heavy
fighting between government troops and pro-Russia separatists, and
rebels had bragged about shooting down two Ukrainian military jets in
the region just a day earlier.
Ukraine accused the rebels of
shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane. The rebels denied it and
accused government forces of the same; President Petro Poroshenko denied
it as well.
Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for
the downing, saying it was responsible for the unrest in its
Russian-speaking eastern regions but did not accuse Ukraine of shooting
the plane down and not address the key question of whether Russia gave
the rebels such a powerful missile. Ukraine and the West have accused
Russia of supporting the rebels, a charge that Moscow denies.
Ukrainian
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk described the downing Friday as an
"international crime" whose perpetrators would have to be punished in an
international tribunal.
"Yesterday's terrible tragedy will
change our lives. The Russians have done it now," he was cited as saying
by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
An assistant to the
insurgency's military commander, Igor Girkin, said Friday on condition
of anonymity that eight out of the plane's 12 recording devices had been
located at the crash site. He did not elaborate. Since airplanes
normally have both a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder,
it was not exactly clear what devices he was referring to.
He
said Girkin was still considering whether to give international crash
investigators access to the sprawling crash site. Any investigators
would need specific permission from the rebel leadership before they
could safely film or take photos at the crash site, he said.
Kenneth
Quinn of the Flight Safety Foundation said an international coalition
of countries should lead the investigation. The Unites States has
offered to help.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lay
repeatedly insisted Friday that the airline's path was an
internationally approved route and denied accusations that Malaysia
Airlines was trying to save fuel and money by taking a more direct
flight path across Ukraine.
"I want to stress that this route is
an approved path that is used by many airlines including 15 Asia-Pacific
airlines. We have not been informed that the path cannot be used," he
said
Malaysia's prime minister said there was no distress call before the plane went down.
Aviation
authorities in several countries, including the FAA in the United
States, had issued previous warnings not to fly over parts of Ukraine
after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March. Within hours of the
crash Thursday, several airlines announced they were avoiding parts of
Ukrainian airspace.
On Friday, Ukraine's state aviation service
closed the airspace over two regions currently gripped by fighting
Donetsk and Luhansk and Russian aviation regulators said Russian
airlines have suspended all transit flights over Ukraine.
At a
news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines updated its
nationality count of passengers, saying the plane carried 173 Dutch, 24
Malaysian, 27 Australian, 12 Indonesian, 9 British, 4 German, 4 Belgian,
3 Filipino and one person each from Canada and New Zealand.
Passengers
on the plane included a large contingent of world-renowned AIDS
researchers and activists headed to an international AIDS conference in
Melbourne, Australia. News of their deaths sparked an outpouring of
grief across the global scientific community.
In Kuala Lumpur,
several relatives of victims were meeting with counselors at the
international airport. A distraught Akmar Mohamad Noor, 67, said her
older sister was coming to visit the family for the first time in five
years.
"She called me just before she boarded the plane and said, 'See you soon,'" Akmar said.
In the Netherlands, flags were flying at half-staff across the country as residents mourned the victims.
Anton
Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, said on his
Facebook page the plane was flying at about 10,000 meters (33,000 feet)
when it was hit by a missile from a Buk launcher, which can fire up to
an altitude of 22,000 meters (72,000 feet). He said only that his
information was based on "intelligence."
___
Karmanau
reported from Kiev. Others who contributed included Peter Leonard in
Kiev; Mstyslav Chernov in Rozsypne, Ukraine; Nataliya Vasilyeva in
Moscow; Lolita C. Baldor and Darlene Superville in Washington; Mike
Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; and Eileen Ng and Satish Cheney in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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