Updated 12:30 p.m. Moscow Time
DONETSK, October 13 (RIA Novosti) – The leadership of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) is ready to let Ukrainian investigators visit the Malaysian Airlines plane crash site, DPR Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko said Monday.
“Of course, the number of these experts should be agreed with us. They will be guarded by our forces, and there will be no Dutch police or German paratroopers,” Zakharchenko noted.
"It is strange that the debris is not being collected. I am not an expert, but it's clear to me that the debris should be collected and studied," Zakharchenko added, noting that interesting information about the crash continues to surface like the fact that a Ukrainian Air Force plane was nearby when the accident happened.
Earlier it was reported that Dutch and Ukrainian officials have reached an agreement on the Ukrainian search teams to start their work on the site of the MH17 crash on Monday. Ukrainian authorities will then transfer the findings to a Dutch team in the town of Kharkiv.
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 so high.
