Alexander Borodai also said the bodies recovered from the crash site in eastern Ukraine would remain in refrigerated train cars at a station in the rebel-held town of Torez until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.
Ukraine and the separatists accuse each other of firing a surface-to-air missile Thursday at Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur some 33,000 feet (10,000 meters) above the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Both deny shooting down the plane. All those onboard the
flight — 283 passengers and 15 crew — were killed.
It was immediately not clear on Sunday if the rebels and the Ukrainian government were working together or at odds with each other on recovering the bodies — and from their comments, many of officials didn’t appear to know either.
A Ukrainian emergency spokeswoman said the armed rebels had forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and did not tell them where the bodies were going. Ukrainian government officials, meanwhile, prepared a disaster crisis center in the government-held city of Kharkiv, expecting to receive the bodies, but those hopes appeared delayed or even dashed Sunday.
Borodai said he was expecting a team of 12 Malaysian experts and that he was disappointed at how long they had taken to arrive.
He insisted that rebels had not interfered with the crash investigation, despite reports to the contrary by international monitors and journalists at the crash site. The rapid-fire developments on Sunday morning came after a wave of international outrage over how the bodies of plane crash victims were being handled and amid fears that the armed rebels who control the territory where the plane came down could be tampering with the evidence.