Ukrainian rebels tampered with the wreckage from downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 “on an industrial scale,” Australia’s prime minister charged Tuesday, as European monitors said pieces of the downed plane had been “hacked into” with diesel-powered saws.
Meanwhile, a Dutch official said only 200 victims’ bodies had arrived by train in the government-controlled city of Kharkiv, and not the 282 that the separatists claimed they had turned over, and the US government was preparing to release intelligence proving the missile that blew up the Boeing 777 was launched from rebel territory.
A map tweeted by a CNN reporter showed the SA-11 missile’s trajectory starting in Snizhne, near the Russian border, heading northwest and detonating in the flight path of eastbound Flight MH17, which fell in pieces into fields on the outskirts of Hrabove.
A senior Ukrainian military official, Vitaly Nayda, also said a Russian military officer had personally pushed the button that blew the passenger plane out of the sky, CNN reported.
Australian PM Tony Abbott said evidence from the crash site revealed “evidence tampering on an industrial scale and obviously that has to stop.”
“After the crime, comes the cover-up,” Abbott said.
Meanwhile, a Dutch official said only 200 victims’ bodies had arrived by train in the government-controlled city of Kharkiv, and not the 282 that the separatists claimed they had turned over, and the US government was preparing to release intelligence proving the missile that blew up the jet was launched from rebel territory.
A map tweeted by a CNN reporter showed the SA-11 missile’s trajectory starting in Snizhne, near the Russian border, heading northwest and detonating in the flight path of eastbound Flight MH 17, which fell in pieces into fields on outskirts of Hrabove.
A senior Ukrainian military official, Vitaly Nayda, also said a Russian military officer had personally pushed the button that blew the airliner out of the sky, CNN reported.
The head of the Dutch forensics team in charge of retrieving the victims’ bodies said investigators were planning to site to search for more victims’ bodies, The BBC reported.
“We will not leave until every remain has left this country so we will have to go on and bargain again with the people over there,” Jane Tuinder told reporters.
A BBC reporter later tweeted that the Dutch hadn’t yet been through all of the refrigerated train cars, and that the number of bodies on board “could increase.”
The remains are set to be flown for identification to the Netherlands, which lost 193 citizens, with Prime Minister Mark Rutte saying the process “might in some cases take weeks or months.”
The plane’s black boxes also arrived Tuesday in Kharkiv en route to Britain, one of only two European countries with sophisticated “replay units” where investigators can listen to the pilots’ last words — and possibly even heard the explosion that killed all 298 people onboard, according to the BBC.