Separatists pledge to cooperate

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a statement posted on its website on Friday that it had received the guarantees during a video conference between a "contact group" of senior representatives from the Vienna-based body and the pro-Russian rebels.

"As a matter of priority, they shall close off the site of the catastrophe and allow local authorities to start preparations for the recovery of bodies," the statement said. It also said the separatists would cooperate with Ukrainian authorities with regard to "all practical questions arising in the course of the recovery and investigation."

Kyiv had earlier complained that the rebels had prevented its officials from reaching the site of Thursday's crash, in which all 298 people on board were killed.

The debris from the crash of flight MH17, which was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it came down, is spread over a field near the village of Harbove in the rebel-held Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

Those killed included 154 Dutch, 27 Australian, 11 Indonesian, six British, four Belgians and four German nationals. All of the 15 crew members were from Malaysia.

Surface-to-air missle suspected

The cause of the crash, the second of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 this year, was not immediately clear. However US intelligence officials have said they have reason to believe that it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, that they were still trying to determine whether it had been fired from the Ukrainian or Russian side of the border.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday accused pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine of shooting down the plane, while the rebels blamed Ukrainian forces.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose government has been accused by the West and Kyiv of actively supporting the rebels, did not accuse Ukraine of pulling the trigger, but did say it was responsible.

"This tragedy would not have happened if there were peace on this land, if the military actions had not been renewed in southeast Ukraine," a statement released by the Kremlin on Friday said.

The crash has raised questions about whether it was safe to fly over the area, where a number of military aircraft have been reported shot down in recent weeks. Asked about the issue on Thursday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said international authorities had deemed the flight path safe.

"The aircraft's flight route was declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organization. And the International Air Transportation Association has stated that the airspace the aircraft was traversing was not subject to restrictions," he said.

Since the crash, a number of international airlines, including Germany's flag carrier, Lufthansa, have rerouted their flights to Asia.

pfd/jlw (AP, dpa, Reuters, AFP)