HRABOVE, Ukraine—They could have been local plumbers or painters. Three men dressed in civilian work clothes were putting on purple latex gloves and preparing to trudge through a field outside this separatist-held village to continue retrieving bodies from the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday.
The men wore plain clothes and assisted uniformed regional emergency services workers. For the first time on Saturday, they started gathering whole and dismembered bodies from the rebel-controlled crash site, where the remains of the nearly 300 passengers traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur already began to show signs of decomposition in the humid summer heat, days after plummeting into an empty field next to an animal husbandry complex.
The men were carrying the bodies out on hand-held army-green stretchers that looked as if they dated back to the Soviet era. Those working on the site already had marked the locations of the bodies with white ribbons attached to tree branches, the fabric at times flapping in the light wind like modest flags of surrender. The three men then traversed the field to reach each flag, piling the bodies onto the stretchers and zipping them up in black body bags that languished on the side of the road in a heap across from a patch of sunflowers
Days after the crash, the site of the accident remained in near chaos, with no cordon around the bodies or remains of the plane. One TV journalist climbed through the field to film himself two feet from what looked like part of the plane’s rear. About a few dozen rebel militants were at the scene, some in face masks and camouflage. They blocked the main road through the site with a bus and patrolled part of the street with guns. No guards were immediately visible around the perimeter of the territory, which had no “caution” tape cordon and could have been accessed by nearly anyone.
Some of the rebel guards became agitated as journalists tried to pass through the main road to the makeshift emergency-services encampment, staffed by officials from the Donetsk region’s division of Ukraine’s national emergency services ministry.
One of the separatists shot in the air as a warning after becoming angry with one of the journalists gathered along the road just a few feet away from a pile of victims’ intact belongings, including a black suitcase, a red fedora, a smashed up Mac laptop, and some duty-free alcohol, which looked as if they had been piled there in a clearing.
“Who let them in?” one of the militants, a skinny middle-aged man with very few teeth, said to another.
“They’re letting everyone in,” his colleague replied.
Earlier, the rebels had a chaotic interaction with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitoring delegation on the crash site that visited Friday and Saturday. The delegation expressed dissatisfaction about the state of the bodies and lack of full, unhindered access.
The disorder at the scene, and within the rebel-held territory in general, raised challenges to the dignified cleanup and objective investigation that countries around the world have demanded.
The Donetsk region’s emergency-services workers, which normally answer to a command structure in the Ukrainian capital, have found themselves in a particularly difficult situation since fighting broke out between Ukraine’s national authorities and local pro-Russia separatists this spring. Many of them have continued to work amid fighting and difficult circumstances despite alternating demands on both sides of the conflict to swear allegiance. Ukrainian authorities expressed frustration Friday with the rebels’ refusal to grant their investigators full access.
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Alexei Migrin, head of emergency services for the Donetsk region, said in a brief interview at the crash site that his organization’s task was to serve the people of the region in emergencies regardless of politics. He said about 100 emergency-services workers were collecting bodies on the site alongside about 243 volunteers.
Though estimates initially put the span of the sprawling crash site at about 15 kilometers, Mr. Migrin said it was closer to 35, with debris scattered across more than one town.
Mr. Migrin described his service’s only task at the moment as identifying and collecting bodies, explaining that the remains of 190 individuals had been collected as of late Saturday afternoon. He said security at the territory wasn’t a job for the emergency services, which had been working around the clock on the issue of the bodies since the crash. Other people were responsible for the security and investigation, he said, and there isn’t any set protocol of coordination among the groups.
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