ROZSYPNE, Ukraine (AP) — Emergency workers, police officers and even off-duty coal miners spread out Friday across the sunflower fields and villages of eastern Ukraine, searching the wreckage of a jetliner shot down as it flew miles above the country’s battlefield.
The attack Thursday afternoon killed 298 people from nearly a dozen nations — including vacationers, students and a large contingent of scientists heading to an AIDS conference in Australia.
U.S. intelligence authorities said a surface-to-air missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, but could not say who fired it. The Ukraine government in Kiev, the separatist pro-Russia rebels they are fighting and the Russia government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all deny shooting the passenger plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a cease-fire Friday in eastern Ukraine and urged the two sides to hold peace talks as soon as possible. A day earlier, Putin had blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying the government in Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions. But he did not accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and did not address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry released a video purporting to show a truck carrying the Buk missile launcher it said was used to fire on the plane with one of its four missiles apparently missing. The ministry said the footage was filmed by a police surveillance squad at dawn Friday as the truck was heading to the city of Krasnodon toward the Russian border.
There was no way to independently verify the video.
Ukraine has called for an international probe to determine who attacked the plane and the Unites States has offered to help. But access to the sprawling crash site 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.
By midday, 181 bodies had been located, according to emergency workers in contact with officials in Kiev. Malaysia Airlines said the passengers included 189 Dutch, 29 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos and one person each from Canada and New Zealand.
Still Nataliya Bystro, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s emergency services, said rebel militiamen were interfering with the recovery operation.
Separatist rebels who control the crash site issued conflicting reports Friday about whether they had found theplane’s black boxes or not.
“No black boxes have been found … we hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened,” said Donetsk separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai.
Yet earlier Friday, an aide to the military leader of Borodai’s group said authorities had recovered eight out of 12 recording devices.
Since planes usually have two black boxes — one for recording flight data and the other for recording cockpit voices — it was not clear what the number 12 referred to.
Borodai said 17 representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation and four Ukrainian experts had traveled into rebel-controlled areas to begin an investigation into the attack.
Ukraine’s state aviation service closed the airspace Friday over two border regions gripped by separatist fighting — Donetsk and Luhansk — and Russian airlines suspended all flights over Ukraine.
An angry Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott demanded an independent inquiry into the downing.
“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.
For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed Kiev’s accusations that Moscow could be behind the attack.
“Regarding those claims from Kiev that we allegedly did it ourselves: I have not heard a truthful statement from Kiev for months,” he told the Rossiya 24 television channel.
He also said Russia has no intention of getting ahold of the plane’s black boxes and added that they should be given to international aviation organizations.
The crash site was spread out over fields between two villages in eastern Ukraine — Rozsypne and Hrabove — and 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, tall growth that was over their heads. 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 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 (heart) 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 the tail landed 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 Wednesday.
Anton Gerashenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said 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). Malaysia’s prime minister said there was no distress call before the plane went down.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk described the attack 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.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lay repeatedly insisted 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.
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.
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 the Netherlands, flags were flying at half-staff across the country as residents mourned the victims.
At the Tour de France cycling race, all riders observed a minute of silence for the victims before the start of the day’s stage in Saint-Etienne. The Dutch team Belkin wore black armbands.
Several relatives of victims met with counselors at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport. A distraught Akmar Mohamad Noor, 67, said her older sister was coming to visit for the first time in five years.
“She called me just before she boarded the plane and said, ‘See you soon,'” Akmar said.
___
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.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I’ll bet he wants a “cease-fire” now that he’s established himself as a person richly deserving of the attention of the cross hairs. He’s become the most hated person in Europe overnight. That’s saying something. He’s lucky he hasn’t been droned already.
Well I think he is sharing the limelight with the so -called “Strelkov”, who was Putin’s go-to guy in Ukraine. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if in the coming weeks this “Strelkov” dies a “heroic death” but with his hands tied and a bullet to the back of the head.
Just being contrarian, but perhaps we should wait a little bit before all of us jump on the bandwagon of the Russians and the separatists did this. Please let us remember that the Ukraine has the same type of missiles that are alleged to have been used in the tragedy. They got them from the same place as the are now shrilly screaming that the separatists got them: Russia. A year ago, at this time, the Russians and the Ukrainians were intimate lovers.
All the “evidence” so far has come from the Ukrainian secret police. Voice tapes are very easy to dummy up. Even a kid with a computer can make Kennedy’s inaugural speech sound like Castro gave it.
The “video” of the alleged separatist missile launcher trundling away with one missile missing is easy enough to create, especially if you have the same kind of missiles that allegedly shot down this aircraft. These do not readily lend themselves to any credibility supporting the allegations. Altering video with Photoshop is an unremarkable task. Photoshop works on video as well as still pictures.
I do not pretend to say that the separatists are innocent in this tragedy. All I am saying is that the US press, particularly the Associated Press, has been flogging this story of “Ukraine good-Russia/separatists bad” for nearly a year now. Well over half the time, the world press has debunked the AP’s claims. We should all wait before making all kinds of editorial accusations until the facts become clearer. Right now the facts are as obscure as San Francisco once the fog rolls in from the Pacific.
Probably the most telling reason to reserve judgment on this, is the fact that the USA has taken such a non-committal position on this. If everyone will recall, it was the USA and its media who jumped all over Syria about gassing the rebels without a shred of proof. Even today, that “proof” is very much in doubt, given the vast amount of evidence that it was the rebels who gassed a government stronghold with Sarin gas provided by the USA.
If there were any slim or even manufactured evidence that the separatists in Eastern Ukraine shot that plane down, the USA would have been screaming the loudest about who bore responsibility for this murderous event. As would the USA’s media. Please remember that the USA has satellites hovering over Russia that can clearly show nails hammered through a sheet of plywood. The story the “we can’t tell exactly where the missile came from” narrative is pure bullshit. The NSA knows, down to less than a square meter, exactly where that missile came from.
All of which lends further weight to the argument of waiting until there are some real facts before jumping to conclusions. But in all of the USA’s media, there is still a “Cold War” mentality that says the Russians did it, the facts be damned. It is the old “If it bleeds, it ledes” story of the piling on aspect of the USA’s media. Even ones that are usually very responsible and don’t jump to conclusions, normally.
In a gesture of national friendship, Putin and Presidential loser John McCain then rubbed bath salts on each other while naked in a Russian bath.
But that wasn’t at all gay. Not a bit.
“Umm–I’d like to close Pandora’s box now (After I just opened it)…”