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Fighting stops investigators for second day

Fighting forced international experts to abandon plans for a second day running to get to the site in eastern Ukraine where a downed Malaysian airliner crashed to conduct their investigation, officials and pro-Russian rebels said.

The Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said on Twitter its experts travelling with Australian and Dutch ones were forced to return to the provincial capital of Donetsk for "security reasons".

Rebel leader Vladimir Antyufeyev told reporters in Donetsk the separatist fighters escorting international experts to the site encountered fighting and turned back.

The joint Australian-Dutch probe team said fierce fighting also kept them away the previous day.

Evidence could be lost if fighting continued, said Australia’s deputy commissioner of national security Andrew Colvin, and the chances of finding the remains of all 298 dead grew slimmer as time passed.

                                        

Clashes overnight between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels killed at least 13 people.

Colvin acknowledged that it could be some time before the team gained access to the crash site.

"There remains a possibility that we may not get there in the near future," he said. "I don't want to consider the fact that we may never get to that site."

Ukraine said on Sunday it was trying to dislodge the rebels, but denied it was fighting near the crash site, saying the separatists had put the monitors off by falsely claiming the army was operating nearby.

The unarmed Australian and Dutch team of police investigators, guided by OSCE, which has already made a short visit to the site, needed to be assured of a sizeable window of time at the site to complete the probe, Colvin said.

"We don't want to put our officers in danger for the sake of a brief look at the site," he said. "We've had a look at the site already... the next stage of this is to get in and start the examination."

- Reuters

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