Remains of MH17 victims in limbo as rebels in Ukraine hold bodies hostage

TOREZ, Ukraine — The tension in the dispatch room of the tiny city’s railway station reflected on the face of one a dispatcher, Veronika, who begged journalists to stop asking questions about refrigerated wagons waiting for transport on Track One.

“Please, let us work here. We are all upset by this situation,” said the middle-aged woman in a floral-print summer dress. “We’re just here waiting for orders, and they will come as simple numbers in a computer. What else can we do?”

That nearly 190 bodies of the victims of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 were now resting in three of the five cooled wagons on the station’s tracks weighed heavily on Veronika. Most people have never even heard of Torez, a small mining community about an hour's drive from the city of Donetsk.

But that all changed Thursday, when the large Boeing 777 crashed just 9 miles from the Torez train station, killing all 298 on board. The wreckage of the decimated plane was flung all across this rural, coal-rich region, drawing unwanted attention to its residents.

The controversy of the investigation into the plane’s downing landed abruptly in Veronika’s workplace, and with it, a band of international journalists waiting outside her office door and filming the gray train wagons holding the bodies on the tracks, more accustomed to local commuter trains and cargo wagons piled high with black coal.

And the remains of many of the victims of Flight 17 are now stuck in a tug of war between Ukraine, supported by the international community, and the pro-Russian insurgents, who claimed control of part of the country's eastern region in April. The rebels have extended that command over not only the bodies of those killed but also the evidence from the crash site.

Where exactly the bodies would be taken was still up for debate late into the day Sunday. While Ukraine has set up a crisis center in the eastern city of Kharkiv to receive the bodies and the families of the victims, the separatists, who have been engaged in the violent conflict with Kiev’s military forces for three months, have said the bodies would stay on the tracks until experts from Malaysia arrived to examine them.

In a press conference in the rebel’s headquarters in downtown Donetsk, the self-declared prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Borodai, said the bodies “will go nowhere” until the Malaysians arrived. So far, Borodai said, the rebels have done nothing to block a thorough investigation of the attack on the plane.

Ukraine, backed by the United States, has accused the rebels of downing the plane with a Russian-made, land-to-air missile system. The U.S. has said it is “likely” that the plane was shot down by a missile fired from a separatist-controlled area near Torez. Kiev has repeatedly accused the Kremlin of supporting the separatist rebels, and on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said evidence was pointing to the need for Russia to take some responsibility for the crash.

The rebels have said they had nothing to do with the crash and place blame on Kiev’s “fascist junta” for shooting down the plane to tarnish the rebels’ image.

Rescue workers began bagging and removing the bodies from the crash site on Saturday, three days after the plane first went down in fields and villages near Torez. Many of the victims' bodies had started to decay and decompose in the summer heat and scattered rain showers. Some weren’t full bodies at all but just arms and limbs that will be difficult to identify.

All the while, the emergency workers operated under the watchful eye of armed rebels, who patrolled the crash sites. On Saturday, armed rebels created a strict perimeter of “security” at the site as representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation tried to visit the site and get access to the plane’s wreckage.

Late Saturday night, the 192 body bags and several bags with pieces of human remains were loaded onto open trucks and taken to the Torez railway station, where the refrigerated wagons waited for them.

The trucks arrived at the station around midnight Sunday, and workers unloaded the bodies for several hours, according to Vera, a pensioner who said she watched the process from her apartment window facing the parking lot of the station.

“They worked quietly, but it took them some time,” she said, as her two elderly neighbors nodded in agreement. While they were aware that the cargo being unloaded from the trucks and placed on the trains was most likely the body bags they had seen on the television news, they didn’t know who had caused the plane’s crash. Conspiracy theories about whether the bodies were actually from the crash or planted there as part of some kind of plot from Kiev were easy for them to believe, the women said.

Such theories have been reported in some Russian media, the dominant source of information in this separatist-controlled area.

“We don’t know what happened, but the whole thing looks suspicious,” Vera said.

On Sunday, members of the OSCE returned to the site and were allowed to walk closer to the plane’s fuselage, which left a blackened streak in the village of Hrabove’s wheat fields.

There are still an estimated 100 more bodies to be accounted for, and rescue workers and volunteer miners continued to scour fields of sunflowers and patches of forest for remains.

For now, the bodies that have been collected will remain in the refrigerated train wagons in Torez, where Veronika and her colleagues are waiting for instructions about their destination. The refrigeration was working full time, but when the wind blew a certain way, the smell of decaying bodies eked out of the cracks of the sealed wagons. Flies hovered near one of the wagon’s doors.

“The whole thing is just heartbreaking for all of us here,” Veronika said with tears in her eyes. “We’re really upset that this has happened at all, and then this… here.”

With wire services