Shelling bars crash site access

Fighting keeps outside monitors from jetliner in Ukraine

Self-proclamed Donetsk People's Republic policemen search a minivan near Shakhtarsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine on Monday, July 28, 2014. An international police team abandoned its attempt to reach the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines plane for a second day running Monday as clashes raged in a town on the road to the area.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Self-proclamed Donetsk People's Republic policemen search a minivan near Shakhtarsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine on Monday, July 28, 2014. An international police team abandoned its attempt to reach the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines plane for a second day running Monday as clashes raged in a town on the road to the area.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

SHAKHTYORSK, Ukraine -- Artillery fire blocked the route to the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner in eastern Ukraine on Monday, forcing an international delegation of European monitors and police officials to turn back without reaching the crash site.

The setback to secure the site, recover more bodies and begin an independent investigation came as Navi Pillay, the U.N. human-rights official, said the downing of the Boeing 777-200 on July 17 may constitute a war crime. She did not ascribe blame.

Ukrainian government troops are trying to retake control of the region around the crash site from pro-Russia rebels. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Monday that the United Nations should guarantee security in the area, and he called on Ukraine to respect a U.N. Security Council resolution of July 21 that called on all parties to refrain from any action that would complicate the investigation.

U.N. monitors and Ukrainian officials displayed growing concern over allegations of human-rights violations in eastern Ukraine. A report by U.N. rights monitors, released Monday, said that "a total breakdown of law and order and a reign of fear and terror have been inflicted by armed groups on the population."

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister of Ukraine, said Monday that officials found a mass grave containing 14 bodies in the center of the city of Slovyansk, which was a rebel stronghold until government troops recaptured it earlier this month.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it fell from the sky in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, killing all 298 people on board.

Ukrainian and U.S. officials say that a Russian-made, surface-to-air missile fired by separatist rebels brought down the jetliner. The Kremlin and the rebels have denied the accusation and say Ukraine is to blame for the crash.

Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said Monday that an analysis of the airliner's flight recorders showed that shrapnel from a rocket blast caused "massive explosive decompression."

It was not clear how that interpretation had been made known to officials in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, because the flight recorders are being examined in Britain. But Lysenko's remarks were in line with other Western accounts and with earlier independent analysis of wreckage from the plane, showing signs of shrapnel.

Lavrov repeated the Kremlin's call for the United States to make public whatever evidence it had to back up the accusation that the plane had been brought down by a missile fired from rebel-controlled territory.

"We do not understand why the Americans, who say that they have strong evidence to support their accusation, why they do not show that evidence," he said at an hour-long news conference.

The United States has released some satellite photographs that it says show Russian-supplied missile launchers in rebel-held territory, in addition to evidence that they had been used.

The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Gen. Igor Konashenkov, called the images "fakes" Monday, according to Russian news agencies. He was quoted as saying that the released images lacked precise locations and were too low in resolution to be definitive.

The general accused both Ukraine and the United States of collaborating to create false evidence.

In eastern Ukraine, a large delegation of European monitors and unarmed Dutch and Australian police officers set out from the provincial capital, Donetsk, on Monday, trying to reach the crash site. Though several forensic experts accompanied the group, the main intention of the journey was to test the safety of the access route for larger groups of investigators who are seeking to recover bodies and evidence.

The convoy left from an area of Donetsk under rebel control, and separatist fighters led the way in commandeered Ukrainian police cars, with their lights flashing. They were followed by vehicles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and by a car carrying the heads of the Dutch and Australian police contingents.

Separatists at checkpoints along the road waved the convoy through. But at Shakhtyorsk, the group stopped for a time, and artillery explosions could be heard on the road ahead. The convoy inched forward again but then turned back because of the danger.

Lysenko, the government spokesman in Kiev, acknowledged that Ukrainian armed forces were in the region, but he denied that they were fighting near the wreckage of the Malaysian plane Monday.

In Kiev, Gerashchenko, the Interior Ministry adviser, said investigators were able to identify four of the 14 bodies that were found in a mass grave in a grassy area in the center of Slovyansk, near an obelisk commemorating an unknown soldier. Gerashchenko said investigators had not yet determined how the victims had died, who had killed them or why.

Information for this article was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar and James Kanter of The New York Times.

A Section on 07/29/2014

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