Malaysia Airlines flight MH17: Pro-Russian Seperatists Take Control Of Victims' Bodies

Smoke rises up at a crash site of a passenger plane, near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, Thursday, July 17, 2014.
Separatist rebels have spirited away all 196 bodies that workers recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site to an unknown location, Ukraine's emergency services said Sunday.
Associated Press journalists saw the pro-Russia rebels putting bagged bodies onto trucks at the crash site Saturday in rebel-held eastern Ukraine and driving them away. On Sunday morning, AP journalists saw no bodies and no armed rebels at the crash site and emergency workers were searching the sprawling fields only for body parts.
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.

Ukraine says Russia has been sending sophisticated arms to the rebels, which Moscow denies. The crash site is close to the Russian border.

Ukrainian Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Nataliya Bystro said recovery workers in the rebel-held territory had been laboring under duress and were forced to give the bodies to the armed gunmen.

"Where they took the bodies — we don't know," Bystro told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Separatists were not immediately available to comment on her statement.

A spokeswoman for the international monitors at the crash site, Iryna Gudyma, later said some of the bodies had been loaded onto trains in the rebel-held town of Torez, 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the crash site. Speaking Sunday from the crash site by phone, she said she did not know how many bodies were in Torez.

News reports of how the bodies had been decaying for days in the summer sun had ignited outrage worldwide, especially from the Netherlands, home to over half the victims.

Alexander Pilyushny, an emergency worker combing the crash site for body parts Sunday morning, told the AP it took the rebels several hours to take away the bodies on Saturday. He said he and other workers had no choice but to hand the bodies over to the rebels.