A 30-strong delegation, made up mostly of officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, traveled to the crash site Friday afternoon. But at the village of Hrabove, rebel militiamen only allowed the OSCE team to perform a partial and superficial inspection.
While the delegation was leaving under orders from armed overseers, two Ukrainian members lingered to glance at a fragment of the plane by the side of the road - only for a militiaman to fire a warning shot in the air with his Kalashnikov rifle.
OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw, who was part of the team, said he was "shocked" to see that bodies were still lying in the open.
European Union officials said Friday that Ukraine has first claim on the plane's two black boxes - a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder - which could contain valuable clues about what happened in the moments before the crash.
An assistant to the insurgency's military commander said Friday that rebels had recovered multiple devices from the wreckage and were considering what to do with them, raising fears they could be headed to Moscow. But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had no intention of getting hold of the boxes, and insurgent leader Aleksandr Borodai later contradicted his colleague and said the rebels don't have them anyway.
Defense experts said the plane was likely shot down by a missile fired from a Buk system, Soviet-era equipment that is in the arsenals of both Russia and Ukraine. There was no previous evidence of separatist rebels using such missiles, though a rebel Twitter account boasted last month about seizing a Buk system from Ukrainian forces, and AP journalists saw such a system hours before the crash Thursday in rebel-held territory.
Feldzer, the air-accident expert, said investigators' goal would be to "find the debris of the missile in question and determine the trajectory." Once investigators reach the site, they should be able to discover whether the plane was hit by one or more missiles, and the size of the missile system involved.
But, he said, "that won't determine who did it," unless investigators can find a satellite photo or radar records of the missile.
Justin Bronk, a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military think tank, said the United States has sophisticated military satellites capable of detecting a missile launch, but might be unwilling to share its images in order to protect its secret surveillance capabilities.
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