Igor Girkin, identified by the Associated Press as a “top pro-Russia rebel commander,” is promoting a conspiracy theory about the crash of MH17:
The pro-rebel website Russkaya Vesna on Friday quoted Igor Girkin as saying he was told by people at the crash site that “a significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh,” adding that he was told they were drained of blood and reeked of decomposition.
Girkin, who also goes by the name Igor Strelkov, says “a large amount of blood serum and medications were found in the wreckage.”
The veracity of Girkin’s assertions depend, of course, on how much stock you put in secondhand accounts of forensic conclusions drawn by untrained Russian nationalists who have spent less than a day studying the widely scattered wreckage of an airplane that has just fallen 30,000 feet.
Read more of Slate’s coverage on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
Correction, July 18, 2014: This post originally stated in error that Girkin had asserted that MH17 victims were killed several days ago. He in fact said that was what he had been told.
