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| CRASHED MALAYSIAN AIRLINER |
(Reuters) – Dozens of bodies from the site where a Malaysian
airliner crashed in eastern Ukraine were loaded into refrigerated wagons at a
rebel-held rail station early on Sunday to be sent home for burial.
But their departure from the war zone was delayed as
Ukrainian officials and rebels traded blame over why the train had not yet set
off and where or when international investigators would be able to check it.
Western officials have voiced concern about the handling of
the remains of the 298 people killed when the airliner crashed on Thursday.
More than half the victims were Dutch and the Netherlands foreign minister has
said his country is “furious” to hear bodies were being “dragged around”.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday what was
happening at the crash site was “really grotesque” and called on Russia to
ensure investigators are allowed access to the area.
“Drunken separatists have been piling bodies into trucks and
removing them from the site,” Kerry said on CBS.
Other victims were from Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia,
Britain, Germany, Belgium, Philippines, United States, Canada and New Zealand.
After lying for two days in the summer heat, the bodies had
been removed from a large swathe of the crash site by Sunday, leaving only
bloodstained military stretchers along the side of the road.
Emergency workers, who have to navigate reporting both to
the authorities in Kiev and the rebels who control the crash site and other areas
in the Donetsk region, will now need to pick through the debris spread across
the Ukrainian steppe.
DELAYED DEPARTURE
A spokesman for the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, which is monitoring the operation, said rebels had told
the team that 167 bodies were in the train and that the monitors had checked
three of the refrigerator wagons.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman told a
news conference 192 bodies and eight fragments of bodies had been placed in the
wagons, but said the Kiev authorities had yet to get the green light from the
rebels for the train to depart.
The rebels responded by suggesting Kiev was delaying their
arrival, arguing they could do nothing until the international experts pledged
by several countries to help determine what and who caused the plane to crash
turned up.
“They will stay there for now, until the issue (of what to
do with them) is resolved. We are waiting for the experts,” said Sergei
Kavtaradze, a senior official of the pro-Russian rebels’ self-proclaimed
Donetsk People’s republic.
Another rebel leader, Andrei Purgin said, with heavy
sarcasm, that the investigators must be “walking from Kiev” because it had
taken such a long time for them to arrive.
“It was very difficult to get written approval … for us to
move the bodies .. to ensure that later they couldn’t say that we savages had
left the people in the sun,” he said.
Groysman denied that Kiev had put up barriers to the
investigators, saying the Ukrainian government was not against them
participating in the investigation.
“We cannot officially provide security guarantees on the
territory which is controlled by the fighters,” he said.
“Therefore each country should decide individually.”
He also said that as far as he knew 38 bodies, which local
media said had been seized at gunpoint from rescue workers late on Friday and
taken to a local hospital, were most probably now among those on the train.
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