KHARKIV, Ukraine -- Bodies of victims and the flight recorders from the Malaysia Airlines jetliner destroyed by a missile last week over eastern Ukraine were delivered by a lumbering freight train Tuesday to Kharkiv, a city controlled by the central government, completing the initial phases of an agreement with pro-Russia rebels negotiated by Malaysia.
But international anger was still swelling over the mistreatment of the victims -- whose corpses lay for days strewn across a wheat field -- the pilfering of their belongings, and the removal of possible evidence that could determine the weapon used to destroy the plane.
In addition, discrepancies emerged Tuesday about the precise number of bodies recovered from the crash site. Malaysian officials and Ukrainian separatist leaders said Monday that 282 bodies and the parts of 16 others were placed aboard the train, totaling 298, the number of passengers and crew who perished. But a Dutch forensics official in Kharkiv, Jain Tuinder, was quoted by the BBC as saying that only 200 bodies were on the train and that another search for more remains would be required.
"We will not leave until every remain has left this country, so we will have to go on and bargain again with the people over there," he was quoted as saying.
Ukrainian, European and U.S. officials have said a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile supplied to the rebels downed the jetliner, but U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that they had no evidence of direct Russian government involvement in the disaster. President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the rebel leaders have strongly denied any responsibility.
The international anger over the crash was reflected in the words of Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia, whose country lost 37 citizens and residents.
"Anyone who has been watching the latest footage would appreciate that there is still a long, long way to go. After the crime comes the cover-up," Abbott said in reaction to images of separatist militants seen rummaging through the wreckage. "What we have seen is evidence tampering on an industrial scale, and obviously that has to stop."
At the crash zone, Malaysia Airlines officials walked the site wearing backpacks, photographing the scattered debris.
Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said observers will check to see whether the wreckage has been disturbed.
"We are keeping a very close eye on that -- looking at the fuselage now compared to what it was on Day One," he said. "And we have noted some differences."
In Moscow, Putin said Russia would do "everything in its power" to facilitate the investigation, including putting pressure on the rebels.
But he said that "was not enough" to resolve the situation. He challenged the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government, saying, "People came to power in an armed, anti-constitutional way."
In Brussels, EU foreign ministers urged Russia to use its influence over the rebels to ensure an independent investigation. In a statement, they said they want "all those in the area to preserve the crash site intact."
The 28-nation EU also targeted more Russian officials with economic sanctions and travel bans. The ministers asked the EU's executive arm to draw up more sweeping measures by Thursday if Russia fails to cooperate.
Those sanctions would target Russia's high-tech, energy and weapons industries.
"Russia has not done enough to contribute to a de-escalation of the conflict," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.
Volodymyr Groysman, Ukraine's deputy prime minister, who is leading a Ukrainian team handling the Malaysia Airlines disaster, said the pro-Russian rebels had slowed the repatriation of bodies and efforts to investigate responsibility.
"Unfortunately, it has taken a long time for the train to get here from the crash site because of obstructions created by the bandits and terrorists," he said in Kharkiv, using the Ukraine government's terminology for the pro-Russia separatists.
Flight 17 was hit at 33,000 feet en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, exploding and crashing about 20 miles from the Russia border. All aboard were killed: two-thirds of them Dutch, and the rest from more than half a dozen countries.
Pushed by a diesel locomotive, the train carrying the bodies of the victims, in five gray refrigerated cars, arrived in Kharkiv after a 17-hour journey out of the lawless territory of the crash site. Also aboard the train, foreign officials said, were the black boxes, which were handed over by rebel leaders to Malaysian emissaries Monday in the separatist movement's self-proclaimed capital of Donetsk.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said in a Twitter message Tuesday that the Malaysians had asked forensics experts in Britain to investigate the contents of the black boxes, which could provide some clues into what was happening aboard the aircraft immediately before its destruction.
The Netherlands sent a Hercules transport plane to Kharkiv, and Australia said it was also sending a plane. All the bodies will be taken to the Netherlands first and then returned to their home countries once they have been identified.
Ester Naber, a Dutch police spokesman, said the bodies would be flown to a military airfield at Eindhoven and transferred to a military base at Hilversum. The victims will be returned to their home countries once identifications have been completed, a process that Naber said "could take weeks or even months depending on the state of the bodies."
In Kiev, the Ukraine capital, a government spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said Ukrainian forces had seized control of several small strategic towns in eastern Ukraine, blocking the main roads between the regional capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are the two biggest remaining strongholds of the Russian-backed insurgents.
Fierce fighting also was reported in areas outside the two cities. Lysenko, the spokesman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said three soldiers had been killed in fighting in Kamyanka, in the Donetsk region.
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Higgins, Rick Gladstone and David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times and by Sergei Chuzavkov, Juergen Baetz, David McHugh, Jona Kallgren, Laura Mills, Lucien Kim, Ken Dilanian and John-Thor Dahlburg of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/23/2014