Pro-Russian separatists move MH17 victims to cooled train cars

Separatist rebel leader Alexander Borodai said Sunday that bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash site in eastern Ukraine would remain in refrigerated train cars at a station in the rebel-held town of Torez, nine miles away, until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.

At the site with the biggest portion of the plane wreckage, where emergency workers had bagged dozens of bodies on Saturday, all had been taken away on Sunday morning. Empty, bloodstained military stretchers that had been used to carry them lay by the road.

Ukraine and the separatists accuse each other of firing a surface-to-air missile Thursday at Flight MH17, as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur some 33,000 feet above the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Both sides deny shooting down the plane. All those aboard the flight — 283 passengers and 15 crew — were killed.

Borodai also said Sunday that pro-Russian rebels have recovered the black boxes from the downed plane and will hand them over to the International Civil Aviation Organization, while Ukraine accused separatist rebels of hiding alleged evidence that a Russian missile was used to shoot down the aircraft.

It was not immediately clear Sunday if the rebels and the Ukrainian government were working together or were at odds over the recovery of the bodies — and from their comments, many of the 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 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 perhaps even dashed Sunday.

"The bodies will go nowhere until experts arrive," Borodai said, speaking in the rebel-held city of Donetsk.

Borodai 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 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 for body parts.

There was no immediate word on the bodies of the 102 other plane victims. Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said some bodies have likely been incinerated.

"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 the five sealed, refrigerated train cars.

Vasily Khoma, deputy 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 train cars. Kharkiv is 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.

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 evidence.

Ukraine says Russia has been sending sophisticated arms to the rebels, a charge Moscow denies.

U.S. officials have described convincing audio recordings that the Ukrainian government has released purporting to be of Russian officers and rebels discussing shooting down the plane.

On Saturday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Moscow likely provided rebels with sophisticated anti-aircraft systems in recent days, matching evidence put forward by Ukraine.

The Journal cited U.S. officials as saying they now suspect that Russia supplied the rebels with multiple SA-11 systems by smuggling them in with other equipment, including tanks.

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.

Britain said Moscow could find itself isolated if it did not use its influence over the rebels to ensure safe access to the crash sites and cooperate with international investigators. "Russia risks becoming a pariah state if it does not behave properly," British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Sky television.

In a 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.

Wire services