After what seemed to be an interminable conflict with investigation efforts, the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine agreed to hand over pertinent evidence regarding the Malaysia Flight MH17 crash that occurred on Thursday. The black boxes and victims' bodies are nearly in the possession of investigators.
It was reported yesterday that the Russian rebels were gathering and moving over 200 bodies from the crash site. They forced emergency workers to hand over the bodies they collected and proceeded put them into four refrigerated train cars in the rebel territory, further mounting concerns of evidence tampering. The rebels also had possession of the plane's black boxes and refused to hand them over to investigators.
However, earlier today the rebels agreed to permit Dutch forensics experts to search the crash site, allowed the bodies of the victims to be taken out of their territory, and surrendered the black boxes to the Malaysian government. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak held a press conference in Kuala Lumpur to announce that his government reached an agreement with the rebels to gain control of the bodies (that are being sent to the Netherlands) as well as the black boxes.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced on Monday that the 200-plus bodies were on their way from Torez, Ukraine (in the rebel territory), to Kharkiv, where the Ukrainian government will send them to the Netherlands for further examination. But despite these successes in negotiating with the Russian rebels, President Obama is still concerned over their behavior at the crash site as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin's role in the situation.
"The burden now is on Russia to insist that the separatists stop tampering with the evidence, grant investigators who are already on the ground immediate, full and unimpeded access to the crash site," said Obama in this CNBC news article. "My preference continues to be finding a diplomatic resolution within Ukraine-I believe that can still happen."
The president also threatened that the U.S. and the international community will not hesitate to issue harsher sanctions on Russia if Putin and co. doesn't cooperate with the investigation. But the European Union announced earlier today that they're unlikely to further punish Russia over the incident. However, British Prime Minister David Cameron said the EU should consider economic sanctions so Russia could not have access to European markets, capital, and technical expertise. France has decided to continue to sell warships to Russia, something Cameron condemned in the meeting on Tuesday.
Experts believe that access to the crash site now might be too late for investigators to gather evidence to determine who was responsible. CBS News correspondent Bob Orr said that any further evidence of a Russian role in the Malaysian crash will likely be obtained from intelligence-gathering and not physical evidence from the site.
You can read more about the Russian rebels handing over evidence to investigators in this New York Times article.
