[Senator Clay Davis]

The treatment of the bodies (being looted, being left to rot and now this) has been absolutely disgusting. Rebels should be ashamed of themselves but it's all about destroying evidence and controlling the scene

Armed rebels forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and had them loaded Sunday onto refrigerated train cars bound for a rebel-held city, Ukrainian officials and monitors said.

The surprising, rapid-fire developments Sunday morning came after a wave of international outrage over how the bodies of plane crash victims were being handled and amid fears that the armed rebels who control the territory where the plane came down could be tampering with the evidence.

Nataliya Khuruzhaya, a duty officer at the train station in Torez, 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the crash site, said she saw emergency workers loading plane victims' bodies Sunday morning into five sealed, refrigerated train cars.

She said the train was scheduled to head to the town of Ilovaysk, 35 kilometers (22 miles) further east toward the Russian border, but no instructions had been given about when it would leave or any possible destinations beyond Ilovaysk.

Russian news agencies said the bodies were heading to the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. Ukrainian officials say they expected to have the bodies eventually delivered to government-held city of Kharkiv, but it's unclear if the rebels will agree to do so.

Earlier, Ukrainian Emergency Ministry spokeswoman Nataliya Bystro said workers at the crash site were forced to hand over the 196 bodies they had recovered to the armed rebels.

"Where they took the bodies — we don't know," Bystro told the AP, adding she had no information about the other 102 victims' bodies.

However, Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said some bodies have likely been incinerated without a trace.

"We're looking at the field where the engines have come down. This was the area which was exposed to the most intense heat. We do not see any bodies here. It appears that some have been vaporized," he told reporters in Kiev, speaking via phone from the crash site Sunday.

Alexander Pilyushny, an emergency worker combing the crash site for body parts Sunday morning, told the AP it took the rebels several hours Saturday to cart away the bodies. He said he and other workers had no choice but to hand over the bodies.

"They are armed and we are not," Pilyushny said.

http://news.yahoo.com/plane-crash-bo...102457009.html