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‘Rebels took 196 bodies’

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GRABOVE: ARMED rebels forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash site and had them loaded onto refrigerated train cars bound for a rebel-held town, Ukrainian officials and monitors said.

The surprising developments yesterday came after a wave of international outrage over how the bodies were being handled and amid fears that the armed rebels, who control the territory, could be tampering evidence.

The rebels have been limiting the movements of international monitors and journalists at the crash site, near the Russian border, and Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry said its workers were labouring under duress, overseen by the rebels.

On Saturday, Associated Press (AP) journalists saw victims’ reeking bodies baking in the summer heat, piled into body bags by the roadside or sprawled at the crash site in the farmland in eastern Ukraine.

By yesterday morning, AP journalists saw no bodies or armed rebels at the site. Emergency workers were searching the sprawling fields only for body parts.

It is not immediately clear if the rebels and the Ukrainian government are working together or are at odds with each other on recovering the bodies, and from their comments, many officials did not appear to know either.

Despite the restrictions seen by journalists and observers at the crash site, separatist leader Alexander Borodai insisted on Saturday that the rebels had not interfered with the work of observers.

Nataliya Khuruzhaya, duty officer at the train station in Torez, 15km from the crash site, said she saw emergency workers loading the bodies into five sealed, refrigerated train cars yesterday.

She said the train was scheduled to head to Ilovaysk, 35km east from the Russian border, but no instructions had been given on when it would leave or any possible destination.

Russian news agencies said the bodies were heading to the rebel stronghold of Donetsk, while Ukrainian officials said they expected to have the bodies eventually delivered to the government-held city of Kharkiv, but it is unclear if the rebels would agree to do so.

Earlier, Ukrainian Emergency Ministry spokesman Nataliya Bystro said workers at the crash site were forced to hand over the 196 bodies they had recovered to the armed rebels.

“Where they took the bodies, we don’t know,” she said, adding that she had no information about the other 102 victims’ bodies.

However, Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors, said some bodies had likely been incinerated without a trace.

Alexander Pilyushny, an emergency worker, said it took the rebels several hours on Saturday to cart away the bodies. He said he and other workers had no choice, but to hand over the bodies. “They were armed and we were not,” said Pilyushny.

Vasily Khoma, deputy of governor of Kharkiv, where Ukraine has set up a crisis centre, said the Ukrainian state railway company had provided the train cars. Kharkiv is 300km north of the crash site.

-NST

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