MOSCOW, July 23 (RIA Novosti) – The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) said Wednesday it found no signs of tampering with a voice recorder from the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that crashed last week in eastern Ukraine.
“The cockpit voice recorder was damaged, but the memory module was intact. No evidence or indication of manipulation of the cockpit voice recorder was found,” the Dutch authorities said in a news release.
The flight data recorder – the second "black box" from the Malaysian plane – will be checked on Thursday, according to DSB.
Earlier, the West accused militia in the east of tampering with evidence at the crash site.
The two black boxes were recovered by Ukrainian independence supporters from the crashed Boeing and given to Malaysian authorities on Monday. They were then sent to the Air Accidents Investigations Branch in southern England for analysis.
Earlier in the day, the Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), an organization overseeing civil aviation in Russia and a number of former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, said that its representative would take part in retrieving and deciphering data from flight recorders of the crashed plane.
The DSB took over formal responsibility for the air crash investigation from Ukraine last night and said that an international team of 24 experts, including Russian and Ukrainian analysts, will investigate the crash that left all 298 people on board dead.
Many of the victims were Dutch and the Netherlands will carry out their identification. The first planes with the remains of victims arrived to the Netherlands earlier on Wednesday, which was declared a day of national mourning by the Dutch government.
The Ukrainian government and militia have been trading blame for the downing of the airliner, with independence supporters saying they lacked the technology to shoot down a target flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet.
On Monday, the Russian military presented information that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter had been gaining altitude in the direction of the Malaysian plane prior to the catastrophe.
