Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have visited the site in eastern Ukraine where flight MH17 crashed on July 17.

Michael Bociurkiw, spokesperson for the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine, said that he had been told that “experts” were retrieving bodies and collecting them at the side of the road.

Bociurkiw said that he could not verify whether the “experts” were Ukrainian government personnel or pro-Russian separatists, who are in control of the territory around the crash site.

An independent international inquiry is being launched into what happened to MH17.

The Russian authorities have said that they were not involved in the incident.

Vitaly Naida, Counter Intelligence Chief at the Ukrainian Security Service, told reporters that he believed that a Buk-M1 missile launcher was used by Russians to bring down the plane.

Naida said: “Rebels cannot operate the very sophisticated and high-technique missile launcher Buk-M1. To operate Buk M-1 you need to have a military education and be well trained. We know for sure the team was Russian, they were Russian citizens operating Buk-M1 – and they came from the territory of the Russian federation together with the missile launcher.”

The Ukrainian defence ministry posted a video online that purports to show a Buk system being transported through eastern Ukraine to the Russian border, minus one of its missiles.