The downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet in Ukraine may be a “war crime”, the UN’s human rights chief says.
Pro-Russia Ukrainian rebels and the Ukrainian officials have accused each other of shooting down flight MH17.
All 298 people on board the airliner - mostly Dutch - died on 17 July.
International police want to help guard the huge site so that plane wreckage and human remains can be examined by international crash experts. Most of the bodies have been removed, many of them sent back to the Netherlands.
“This violation of international law, given the current circumstances, is a war crime,” Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said of the downing of MH17. “Anyone committing serious violations of international law including war crimes will be brought to justice, no matter who they are,” Ms Pillay said.
The conflict has forced more than 200,000 people to leave their homeland. Many of them have fled east to neighboring Russia.
A team of Australian and Dutch police and legal medical experts gave up their efforts to reach the site on Monday, blaming the security situation in the area. It was the second failed attempt in as many days. “We were stopped because there was gunfire and what we understand was artillery impacts nearby, very near,” said Alexander Hug, an official from the OSCE group to Ukraine. “We are sick and tired of being interrupted by gunfights despite the fact that we have agreed that there should be a ceasefire.”
In the past 24 hours there has been heavy artillery fire at the city of Horlivka, where several civilians were killed.
Last week, the US-based Human Rights Watch said both sides in the conflict were using unguided Grad rockets against civilian areas, in violation of human rights standards, and urged them to stop doing so. It documented several attacks in which, it said, the rockets were apparently fired by government forces.
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