Top US diplomat John Kerry has told his Russian counterpart that Washington is "deeply concerned" that international investigators are being denied access to a passenger jet's crash site in Ukraine.
President Barack Obama and other world leaders have expressed outrage and demanded Russia's full co-operation with what is becoming a monumentally challenging probe into the shooting down of a Kuala Lumpur-bound Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam with 298 people from a dozen countries on board.
In a telephone call, Kerry told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that "the United States remains deeply concerned that for the second day in a row, OSCE monitors and international investigators were denied proper access to the crash site", the State Department said.
"The United States is also very concerned about reports that the remains of some victims and debris from the site are being tampered with or inappropriately removed from the site."
Kerry's spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States condemns "unacceptable" insecurity at the crash site, calling it an "affront to all those who lost loved ones and to the dignity the victims deserve."
She said monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were only allowed 75 minutes at the site on Friday, and less than three hours on Saturday.
OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw said earlier that the Vienna-based group's monitoring team on the ground had been "unable today, for the second day, to gain any answers" about the fate of the plane's critical black box flight data recorders.
In Moscow's account of the Kerry-Lavrov conversation, it said it had demanded that "material evidence, including black boxes" must be immediately handed over to inspectors.
Gunmen backed up by muscular diplomatic support from the Kremlin have shown few signs of being ready to cooperate with an investigation that could blame them for blowing apart the Boeing 777 jet.
Kiev said armed fighters were hours away from loading vital clues aboard trucks that would be rushed across the Russian border before a full team of experts inspected the expansive site where remains of flight MH17 hit the ground.
In his call with Lavrov, Kerry urged Russia to take "immediate and clear actions" to reduce tensions in neighbouring Ukraine that have pushed the country into an escalating civil war and East-West standoff.
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