MH17 Crash Site's Integrity Compromised, Investigation Hampered By Pro-Russian Separatists

Machine gun-wielding rebels stopped the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Special Monitoring Mission in their tracks for a second day upon their arrival at the site Saturday afternoon. After negotiations, they were allowed some access to the site, but ordered not to wander off the roadway.

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The area — in which the mangled and decaying bodies of hundreds of passengers and the severed parts of the Boeing 777-200 came to rest — was as lawless as the rest of the territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists, raising concerns that evidence that could show what downed the airliner could be tampered with, or even destroyed.

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A motley mix of local emergency-service workers, civilian volunteers and miners — many of whom said they supported the separatist cause — investigated the wreckage. None had experience conducting such a task.

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OCSE had sent a team on a Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Hrabove, east of Donetsk in Ukraine after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was believed to have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over Ukrainian airspace on Thursday night. The SMM, in a press statement by the OCSE, said the mission had obtained limited access to the crash site, noting that dead bodies were visible. Although the bodies were marked, SMM said they were “exposed to the elements”.

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One rebel on duty, a 26-year-old gunman dressed in fatigues and a beekeeper's mask, reeked of booze. Another, with bloodshot eyes and a beet-red face, could barely keep himself from falling over, let alone handle his automatic rifle.

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This prompted Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai to leave for Kiev last night to help expedite the investigation at the site. Liow, at a press conference last night said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak had demanded the Ukrainian government to provide a safe corridor for the probe team to conduct investigations. He said the Prime Minister had said that any failure to so would be considered “a betrayal”.

None of them said they knew the location of the flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder and other devices that could provide information about how and when exactly the plane was downed. After two days of unfettered access and picking through the charred wreckage, the self-declared prime minister the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Borodai, said there was no sign of the black box, adding that pro-Russian rebels had not touched the site where Flight 17 crashed.

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Nobody seemed to know where the more than 80 bodies bagged throughout the day would be transferred. But just after 5 p.m., local time, after hours of festering in the Ukrainian summer sun, they were loaded on to a rickety old truck bed, and driven away. The Ukrainian government accused pro-Russia rebels on Saturday of taking the bodies from the crash site to a local morgue on their territory, and destroying evidence.

“Terrorists brought 38 bodies to the mortuary in Donetsk,” according to a government statement. It said that Russian experts would likely perform autopsies and that “the terrorists are seeking for the heavy load trucks to carry the plane wreckage to Russia” as part of a cover-up.

The rebel commander who said he was in charge of guarding the crash site, and who identified himself as Commander Grumpy –- “because I get grumpy when I spend too much time away from destroying Ukrainian BMPs [armored fighting vehicles] and tanks. You don’t want to see me grumpy” –- said he did not know where the bodies would be taken. “Maybe they will go here, maybe there,” he teased.

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Yelena Bratchenko, a 20-year-old local bank employee who lives on Shirokaya Street, the epicenter of the crash site, said she was worried where the bodies would be taken, but was glad they were gone. The summer's breeze had blown the heavy, acrid smell of the decaying corpses into her home, upsetting her and her mother. That, and watching them fall from the sky, were impressions she said would never leave her.

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Earlier in the day, Grumpy told Mashable that more than 30 bodies had already been removed from the site, but said he also could not say where they had gone, or whether they would be repatriated.

Before answering any further questions, Grumpy demanded that he be allowed to speak his mind. “Listen, you must understand that this [Flight 17's downing] was a provocation carried out by the ‘junta’ government in Kiev,” he said, parroting a term used by Moscow to describe the government that came to power after the ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February.

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Both the rebels and Ukraine have accused each other of shooting down the plane. But Kiev has provided audio recordings and video it said is evidence that the jetliner was shot down by rebels using a rocket launched from a Buk missile system provided to them by Russia.

National Transportation Safety Board and FBI teams are on their way to the country, NPR's David Schaper tells our Newscast desk. However, they are likely to find the same barriers as the OCSE officials, he says. As former NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman tells NPR, "There are a lot of challenges here, I think chief among them is probably the war zone that they're in, and just the very nature of what the people on the ground are facing."

The bodies are starting to bloat and decay and need to be recovered quickly, OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw tells The Guardian. "We will keep coming back tomorrow and the next day and the next day."

"We want international experts to arrive at the crash site as soon as possible," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian TV. He said the country would not "violate the existing international norms applicable for such cases, contrary to allegations voiced in Kiev."