Flight MH17: Bodies Stuck in Ukraine

TOREZ, Ukraine: Three wrenching days after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the bodies of most of those aboard have ended up here, in a fly-infested railway station in a rough coal-mining town in eastern Ukraine.

For now, they are stuck, lying in five gray refrigerated train cars in this rebel-controlled war zone, hostages to high politics and mutual distrust. The government in Kiev has accused the Russian-backed rebels who control the area of blocking access to the bodies and the crash site and delaying what is already a very painful process for the families of the dead.

The rebels insist they are cooperating, and say they want to turn the 247 bodies they had recovered as of Sunday over to international representatives. But they say those officials have not arrived; the rebels accuse the Ukrainian government of scaring the officials off, though European officials have disputed that claim.

Neither of the conflicting story lines fully reflects the chaos at the scene, where an incoherent recovery effort is being carried out by motley groups of mostly untrained people. On Sunday, they included miners straight from their shifts; local residents who arrive on run-down motorbikes; and poorly equipped emergency service workers who sleep in the field, amid the stench of decay, in sagging orange and blue tents.

The prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, said on Sunday that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was negotiating with rebels to move the bodies out of the conflict zone. "All efforts are focused on getting this train onto territory controlled by Ukrainian authorities," Rutte said in Amsterdam, according to Reuters. He said a team of specialists was likely to enter the crash site Monday in an effort to identify the bodies.

But for now, their train is going nowhere, a final indignity for families as they grieve the loss of their loved ones. When asked on Sunday afternoon where the train was headed, its driver said he had not been given a destination. "Nobody knows, and no one will say," he said.

The United States and Ukraine have criticized the rebels for what they say has been evidence of tampering and concealment at the crash site.

Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, said at a briefing in Kiev that Ukrainian emergency responders had been forced to turn over recovered bodies to the separatists. And other Ukrainian officials said that the roadblocks to getting experts into the site, and the bodies away from it, all lay with the rebels.

At the site itself, there was little sense of any order. Instead of a crime scene marked with police tape, helicopters scouring its 13 square miles, and specialists poring over every detail, the area was a post-Soviet free-for-all playing out in a war zone, where most of the trappings of a modern state have fallen away. With the police mostly gone, for example, militiamen now respond to traffic accidents.

"This is a disaster like no other," said Michael Bociurkiw, the spokesman for the European security agency mission. The standard response, he said, is, "You secure the area and then you go about the established business."

He added: "That hasn't happened here. And whether they even have the ability for that to happen is unclear."

At the crash site on Sunday, rescue workers picked through a charred pile of suitcases, mangled airplane seats and bits of metal and clothing, using nothing but their hands and a few small sticks. Cows grazed in one of the fields near the fuselage. Army green stretchers, some with dark splotches of blood, lay on the matted grass near the road.

US intelligence officials have said a proper investigation could answer crucial questions about who is responsible for shooting down the plane, but the hopes for retrieving anything useful from the site are dwindling with each passing day.

New York Times