TOREZ, Ukraine (AP) — Rebels have recovered the black
boxes from downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and will hand them over to
the International Civil Aviation Organization, a rebel leader said
Sunday.
Alexander Borodai also said the bodies recovered from the
crash site in eastern Ukraine would remain in refrigerated train cars at
a station in the rebel-held town of Torez, 15 kilometers (9 miles)
away, until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.
Ukraine
and the separatists accuse each other of firing a surface-to-air
missile Thursday at Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from
Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur some 33,000 feet (10,000 meters) above the
battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Both deny shooting down the plane. All
those onboard the flight — 283 passengers and 15 crew — were killed.
It
was immediately not clear Sunday if the rebels and the Ukrainian
government were working together or were at odds with each other on
recovering the bodies — and from their comments, many of officials
didn’t appear to know either.
A Ukrainian emergency spokeswoman
said the armed rebels had forced emergency workers to hand over all 196
bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and did not tell
them where the bodies were going.
Ukrainian government officials,
meanwhile, prepared a disaster crisis center in the government-held city
of Kharkiv, expecting to receive the bodies, but those hopes appeared
delayed or even dashed Sunday.
"The bodies will go nowhere until experts arrive," Borodai said, speaking in the rebel-held
city of Donetsk.
Borodai
said he was expecting a team of 12 Malaysian experts and that he was
disappointed at how long they had taken to arrive. He insisted that
rebels had not interfered with the crash investigation, despite reports
to the contrary by international monitors and journalists at the crash
site.
The rapid-fire developments Sunday morning came after a wave
of international outrage over how the bodies of plane crash victims
were being handled and amid fears that the armed rebels who control the
territory where the plane came down could be tampering with the
evidence.
Ukraine says Russia has been sending sophisticated arms to the rebels, a charge that Moscow denies.
The
U.S. embassy in Kiev issued a strong statement Sunday 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 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. The
statement also said Russia was training separatist fighters in southwest
Russia, including on air defense systems.
The rebels have been
strictly limiting the movements of international monitors and
journalists at the crash site, which is near the Russian border, and
Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry said its workers were laboring under
duress, overseen by the armed rebels.
Associated Press journalists
saw reeking bodies baking in the summer heat Saturday, piled into body
bags by the side of the road or still sprawled where they landed in the
verdant farmland in eastern Ukraine after their plane was shot out of
the sky.
By Sunday morning, AP journalists saw no bodies and no
armed rebels at the crash site. Emergency workers were searching the
sprawling fields only for body parts.
There was no immediate word
on the bodies of the 102 other plane victims, but Michael Bociurkiw, a
spokesman for monitors from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, said some bodies have likely been incinerated
without a trace.
"We’re looking at the field where the engines
have come down. This was the area which was exposed to the most intense
heat. We do not see any bodies here. It appears that some have been
vaporized," he told reporters in Kiev on Sunday, speaking via phone from
the crash site.
Alexander Pilyushny, an emergency worker combing
the crash site for body parts Sunday, told the AP it took the rebels
several hours Saturday to cart away the bodies. He said he and other
workers had no choice but to hand them over.
"They are armed and we are not," Pilyushny said.
Nataliya
Khuruzhaya, a duty officer at the train station in Torez, said
emergency workers loaded plane victims’ bodies Sunday into five sealed,
refrigerated train cars.
Vasily Khoma, deputy of governor of the
Kharkiv region where Ukraine has set up a crisis center to handle the
disaster, said the Ukrainian state railway company had provided the
refrigerated train cars. Kharkiv is 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of
the crash site.
He said no information was available on when
airplane parts would be brought to the city and that the priority now
was on recovering bodies. He said a mobile lab to handle DNA analysis
was being delivered from Dnipropetrovsk.
Residents in Kharkov have
been inundating a special call center to offer their services as
volunteers. Ten hotels in Kharkiv say they will give free rooms for
relatives of the victims.
In a blistering article for the Sunday
Times, British Prime Minister David 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," he wrote.
In
a coded rebuke of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European
leaders who have blocked efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Russian
President Vladimir Putin for Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Cameron said
Europe must now "respond robustly."
"For too long, there has been a
reluctance on the part of too many European countries to face up to the
implications of what is happening in eastern Ukraine," Cameron wrote.
Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, speaking in Kiev, demanded that the culprits be found.
"Once we have the proof, we will not stop until the people are brought to justice," he said.

___
Peter
Leonard in Kiev; Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow; Nicholas Garriga in
Hrabove, Ukraine; Lucian Kim in Kharkiv; Danica Kirka in London and
Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.