Video shows flight data recorder being recovered from crash site of flight MH17
Posted July 20, 2014 7:31 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Rescue workers have recovered a flight recorder from the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner that Kiev says militants shot down with a missile, Reuters video shows.
The images show men wearing Ukrainian Emergency Ministry uniforms in the village of Hrabove, in the eastern Donetsk region.
Walking away from emergency vehicles parked at a rural roadside, the men appear to conduct a co-ordinated search through wheat fields at the crash site.
One man is later seen walking across the field carrying an orange-coloured flight data recorder and handing it to a colleague.
Audio from another man who is not viewed can be heard saying “flight recorder”, in Russian. The images were recorded on Friday.
Quite who controls what around the site is unclear. Rebel forces, who have declared a Donetsk People’s Republic in the Russian-speaking east and want union with Moscow, have set up cordons and checkpoints around the area.
The security council in Kiev said staff of the emergencies ministry had found 196 bodies – a little more than half the 298 aboard the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 – and had checked some 18 sq.km of the scattered 25-sq.km crash site.
But the workers were not free to conduct a normal investigation.
Pro-Russian separatists in the region said they had found one of the “black box” recorders on Thursday when the Malaysian airliner came down, killing all 298 people on board.
However, the Prime Minister of the separatist authorities, Alexander Borodai, told a news conference on Saturday, they had in fact not found the black box flight recorders, adding that the rebels were avoiding disturbing the area.
There have been international calls for investigators to get full access to the site, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stressing the point in a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday.
Alexander Borodai, a leader of the main rebel group, the Donetsk people’s republic, said on Saturday his group did not have the black box and had no information that it had been found. The OSCE also said on Saturday it had no information it had been found.
Moscow has repeatedly denied Kiev’s accusations that it is supplying manpower and hardware across the frontier to the rebels.
