Audio recordings on Sunday revealed Ukrainian rebels scheming to seize the “black boxes” from shot-down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on orders from Moscow, as their self-proclaimed leader said the devices had apparently been recovered and “are under our control.”
Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service released three intercepted communications in which a pro-Russia insurgent leader ordered two underlings to find the flight-data recorders.
“I have a request for you. It is not my request,” a man identified as Battalion Vostok Commander Alexander Khodakovsky says in one recording.
“Our friends from high above are very much interested in the fate of the black boxes. I mean people from Moscow.”
Khodakovsky said it was crucial the recorders don’t “get into somebody else’s hands,” mentioning the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, whose investigators were met last week with gunfire at the crash site in rebel territory.
In another conversation an hour later Friday, one day after the disaster, a rebel identified only as Oleksiy asks Khodakovsky if the recorders “should look like some small orange barrels.”
“We found something. This is just a box — satellite navigation block it is written on it,” he said.
“Hide it anyway. Who knows how they are disguised?” Khodakovsky replies.
In Donetsk, separatist leader Alexander Borodai said “technical items” had been recovered.
“Some items, presumably the black boxes, were found, and they have been delivered to Donetsk, and they are under our control,” he said at a news conference, adding that they were to be handed over to international experts.
“There are no specialists among us who could pinpoint the look of the black boxes, but we brought to Donetsk some technical items which could be the black boxes of the airliner.”
Also Sunday, rebels loaded nearly 200 victims’ bodies into refrigerated railcars and removed large pieces of the Boeing 777.
The move outraged US Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Drunken, I mean, literally drunken separatist soldiers are piling bodies into trucks unceremoniously, and disturbing the evidence and disturbing the pattern that is there,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
The remains of the 298 passengers and crew, including 80 children, had lain exposed in a wheat field since Thursday’s missile attack, and an OSCE spokesman described the stench at the train station as “almost unbearable.”
Leaders of Britain, France and Germany all demanded Russian President Vladimir Putin open the crash site to investigators.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Putin would need to provide “compelling and credible evidence” to prove Russia wasn’t involved. He warned that Putin’s “cronies” would face sanctions if Moscow doesn’t withdraw support for the rebels.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,’’ advised Putin to “man up’’ and lead. Asked whether the crisis pushed US-Russian relations back to the Cold War era, she replied, “Yes.”
Additional reporting by Marisa Schultz and Post wires