MH17 black boxes not found: Ukraine rebel leader

Kiev, July 19: Aleksandr Borodai, the pro-Russian rebel leader in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, said on Saturday that black boxes of the Malaysian passenger plane that crashed Thursday had not been found.

Borodai said they had not touched the site where the passenger flight crashed but they reserved the right to begin the process of taking away the bodies since the bodies would decompose in the heat, according to Xinhua.

The rebel leader said they sought help from Russian experts

"We asked the Russian Federation to help us with this problem and send their experts," Borodai, prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, told a press conference.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed Thursday afternoon in the conflict-hit Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.

According to reports, the indications are that the Boeing 777 crashed after being hit by a missile. US President Barack Obama said Friday that initial investigations showed that the missile was fired from an area in Ukraine controlled by anti-Kiev militants.

Earlier Saturday, Kiev accused insurgents of destroying evidence of an international crime from the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner.

"The terrorists have taken 38 bodies to the morgue in Donetsk," the Ukrainian government said in a statement.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said insurgents in eastern Ukraine barred government experts from collecting evidence and threatened to detain them.

IANS