Bodies found at crash site
ROZSYPNE, Ukraine — Emergency workers, police officers and even off-duty coal miners — dressed in overalls and covered in soot — spread out today 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.
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 in the east and the Russia government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all deny shooting the passenger plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.
By midday, 181 bodies had been located, according to emergency workers at the sprawling crash site.
Ukraine has called for an international probe to determine who attacked the plane and the United States has offered to help. But access to the 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 today, with document checks at each.
Separatist rebels who control the crash site issued conflicting reports today about whether they had recovered the plane'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.
Borodai said that 17 representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation and four Ukrainian experts had traveled into rebel-controlled areas to begin a plane investigation.
Earlier today, an aide to the military leader of Borodai's group said authorities had recovered eight out of 12 recording devices.
