Black box shows shrapnel hit flight MH-17

KIEV/DONETSK: Ukraine troops have taken more territory from pro-Russian rebels near the site where Malaysian flight MH-17 was brought down, as international investigators said fighting was preventing them reaching the crash location.

Ukrainian officials said two rebel-held towns had been recaptured and attempts were being made to take a village Kiev says was near the launch site of the surface-to-air missile that shot down the airliner with loss of all 298 on board.

Analysis of black box flight recorders from the airliner showed it was destroyed by shrapnel from a missile blast which caused a “massive explosive decompression”, a Ukrainian official said yesterday.

Investigators in Britain, who downloaded the data, had no comment. They said they had passed information to the international crash investigation led by the Netherlands, whose nationals accounted for two-thirds of the victims.

The separatists are still in control of the area where the plane was shot down but fighting in the surrounding countryside has been heavy as government forces try to drive them out.

At least three civilians were reported killed in overnight fighting, and Kiev said its troops recaptured Savur Mogila – a strategic piece of high ground about 30km from where the Malaysia Airlines Boeing hit the ground – and other areas under rebel control.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Kiev was trying to close in on the crash site and force the rebels out of the area but was not conducting military operations in the immediate vicinity.

He said Ukrainian troops were in the towns of Torez and Shakhtarsk, both formerly held by the rebels, while fighting was in progress for the village of Snezhnoye – close to the presumed missile launch site – and Pervomaisk.

In Donetsk local officials said artillery fire had damaged houses, power lines and a gas pipeline.

The city, with a pre-war population of nearly 1 million, has largely become a ghost town since rebels dug in for a stand in the face of advancing Ukrainian troops.

The site of the crash of the Malaysian airliner has yet to be secured or thoroughly investigated, more than 10 days after the crash. After days in which bodies lay untended in the sun, rebels gathered the human remains and shipped the bodies out, and turned over the flight recorders to a Malaysian delegation.

But the wreckage itself is still largely unguarded, and much of it has been moved or dismantled.

No full forensic sweep has been conducted to ensure all human remains have been collected. – Reuters