Updated 11:14 a.m. Moscow Time
DONETSK, October 14 (RIA Novosti) – Rescue workers and OSCE observers working on the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing in eastern Ukraine came under artillery fire from positions occupied the Kiev government troops, a leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) said Tuesday.
"Rockets fell two kilometers away from the field where experts were gathering items of Boeing passengers," DPR Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Purgin said.
On Monday, DPR Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko said that independence supporters were ready to let Ukrainian investigators visit the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines plane, noting that it was "strange" that the debris from the aircraft was not being collected.
Earlier on Monday, Reuters reported that Dutch and Ukrainian officials had reached an agreement on Ukrainian search teams to start their work on the site of the MH17 crash in order to collect the remains of the bodies and personal belongings and hand them over to the Dutch side.
Later in the day, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroisman told RIA Novosti that he had no official information on the purported agreements that Ukraine and the Netherlands had in place regarding the investigation by the Ukrainian search teams into the MH17 crash site.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine on July 17.
The official cause of the tragedy is still unclear, but according to a preliminary report issued by the Dutch Safety Board on September 9, the plane broke up in mid-air as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from the outside.
The Ukrainian government blames independence supporters of the eastern regions for downing the Malaysia Airlines plane, but the latter say they do not have weapons capable of bringing down an aircraft flying at high altitude.
