The Ukrainian government says 219 bodies have been recovered from the site where a Malaysian airliner crashed after being shot down on Thursday, as well as what they believe are parts of 28 additional bodies. That would leave 51 of the people on the plane still unaccounted for.
Also, a European delegation was given access to the bodies and the crash site in a rebel-held area of eastern Ukraine.
There are still conflicting reports over whether pro-Russian rebels or Ukrainian officials have control over the collected remains. According to some sources, rebels took possession of many of them following their collection by personnel from Ukraine’s Emergencies Ministry, who were granted access to the site by the separatists.
According to some reports, many of the bodies are currently in three refrigerated railway cars in the town of Torez, not far from the crash site. Quoting a senior official of the authorities in Kyiv, Ukrainian media are reporting that negotiations are currently underway to have the bodies transported to territory under Ukrainian government control, possibly to the city of Kharkiv.
It is a gruesome and sad scene in a Ukrainian farm field, said Michael Bociurkiw of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who spoke to reporters in Kyiv via mobile phone.
"We are looking right now at engine parts and parts of the fuselage. It appears to me that this could be the main section, the mid-section, of the aircraft. And we are also seeing emergency workers picking over a very difficult patch of impact, where there is a lot of debris and body parts and banged up bodies put together.”
Earlier, Bociurkiw and his 21-member team had been allowed to see several refrigerated railroad cars parked at a rural train station. He reported that he saw many body bags in the rail cars, but his team could not make its own count.
“Because of the conditions of the train, you need professional protective equipment to go in there. The stench was absolutely overwhelming. I do not want to be too gruesome, but it is a very, very, very difficult scene to watch.”
The OSCE officials are not disaster investigators. They are in rebel-held eastern Ukraine on a human rights mission. But they are the only independent observers in the region, and he said they are trying to document what they can about the disaster.
Donetsk rebel leader Alexander Borodai said the bodies recovered from the crash site would remain in refrigerated train cars in the rebel-held town of Torez, 15 kilometers from the site, until the arrival of an international aviation delegation.
‘‘The bodies will go nowhere until experts arrive,’’ Borodai said, speaking in the rebel-held city of Donetsk.
Borodai also said Sunday the insurgents are holding the flight data recorders with key information from the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet.
He said the so-called black boxes will be handed over to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Sunday demanded Russia take responsibility for actions of allied separatists suspected of shooting down the passenger plane and expressed disgust over the rebels' "grotesque" mishandling of victims' bodies at the crash site.
While stopping short of placing direct blame on Moscow for the shootdown, Kerry articulated the most pointed and detailed U.S. accusations so far that Russia provided pro-Moscow insurgents with the sophisticated anti-aircraft systems used to down the aircraft.
Kerry said the United States intercepted conversations about the transfer to separatists of the Russian radar-guided SA-11 missile system it blames for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia,'' Kerry said in an interview on CNN.
U.S. officials said American intelligence reports indicated Russia had moved multiple SA-11 antiaircraft systems over the border with other military equipment.
"There's [an] enormous amount of evidence, even more evidence [than] I just documented, that points to the involvement of Russia in providing these systems, training the people on them,'' Kerry said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Moscow denies involvement and has accused the Ukrainian military in the shootdown that killed 298 people.
Worshippers at church services across the Netherlands on Sunday prayed for the victims of the Ukraine air disaster and their next of kin, as anger built over the separatist rebels' hindering of the investigation into the downed flight.