Kiev continues to shell area of MH17 crash site

© Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov

Members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) stand near belongings and wreckage at the site where the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed, in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine.

Rescue workers and OSCE observers working on the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing in eastern Ukraine came under artillery fire from positions occupied the Kiev government troops, a leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) said Tuesday.

"Rockets fell two kilometers away from the field where experts were gathering items of Boeing passengers," DPR Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Purgin said.

On Monday, DPR Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko said that independence supporters were ready to let Ukrainian investigators visit the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines plane, noting that it was "strange" that the debris from the aircraft was not being collected.

Earlier on Monday, Reuters reported that Dutch and Ukrainian officials had reached an agreement on Ukrainian search teams to start their work on the site of the MH17 crash in order to collect the remains of the bodies and personal belongings and hand them over to the Dutch side.

Later in the day, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroisman told RIA Novosti that he had no official information on the purported agreements that Ukraine and the Netherlands had in place regarding the investigation by the Ukrainian search teams into the MH17 crash site.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine on July 17.

The official cause of the tragedy is still unclear, but according to a preliminary report issued by the Dutch Safety Board on September 9, the plane broke up in mid-air as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside.

The Ukrainian government blames independence supporters of the eastern regions for downing the Malaysia Airlines plane, but the latter say they do not have weapons capable of bringing down an aircraft flying at high altitude.

Comment: While morons like Tony Abbot continue to blame Russia and the 'separatists', without any evidence, some leaders are showing a trace of sanity. For example, on Monday, Germany's Bundestag Member Alexander Neu said in an interview with International Information Agency Rossiya Segodnya"

"I'm pretty sure that if it was Russia or the rebels in the east of Ukraine to blame, the West would have known that and all that would have been used, and it would be known by the world community... Since this has not yet happened, the question remains, who is to blame, really?

"Then new horizons open up, with the same result it could have been the Ukrainian side, whether it was negligence, an accident or a deliberate act in order to lay the blame on the Russians afterwards. That's also possible."

Answering why the voice recordings of the dispatchers are still not fully published, Neu said that "the [world] community is not being informed again... And then a question arises <...> who benefits from it? Here I come again to the question maybe [it was] Ukraine? And the United States, of course, too, like all the West. The Ukrainian coup regime will not do anything without the consent of the United States."