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MH17 passenger was found wearing oxygen mask

  It has emerged that one of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was wearing an ...
Newstalk
Newstalk

17.47 9 Oct 2014


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MH17 passenger was found weari...

MH17 passenger was found wearing oxygen mask

Newstalk
Newstalk

17.47 9 Oct 2014


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It has emerged that one of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was wearing an oxygen mask when the plane crashed, suggesting at least some of the passengers may have known the plane was crashing.

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans made the revelation during a late-night TV interview on Wednesday.

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"You know that somebody was discovered wearing an oxygen mask and had time to put it on," he said.

The passenger, an Australian, had the elastic strap of the mask around his neck, said Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch National Prosecutor's Office, which is carrying out a criminal investigation into the crash.

It raises the possibility that some passengers knew the plane they were on was doomed.

After Mr Timmermans made the comments, Dutch prosecutors confirmed it in a letter to the victims' families.

"How and when the mask ended up around the victim's neck is unknown," prosecutors said in the letter, which was published online.

Mr De Bruin said forensic experts investigated the mask "for fingerprints, saliva and DNA and that did not produce any results.

"So it is not known how or when that mask got around the neck of the victim."

He also said he did not know where in the plane the Australian victim was sitting.

None of the other 297 victims of the crash was believed to be wearing an oxygen mask, prosecutors added. Thirty-eight Australian residents and citizens were killed in the disaster

Relatives of the Australian passenger were told about the mask as soon as it was discovered.

But the families of other victims heard about it for the first time when Mr Timmermans mentioned it during the TV interview.

Mr Timmermans, the incoming vice-president of the European Commission, later expressed regret for revealing the information.

"The MH17 disaster goes to my heart," he said.

"I should not have made the comment. The last thing I want to do is aggravate the relatives' suffering in any way."

Relatives of victims began calling investigators asking about Mr Timmermans' comments, Mr De Bruin said.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down on July 17 while flying over rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam.

The findings of an initial report by a Dutch-led team of air crash investigators appear to back up claims that the plane was hit by an anti-aircraft missile.

Kiev and the West have accused Moscow-backed separatists of shooting the down airliner with a surface-to-air BUK missile supplied by Russia.

Moscow denies the charge and has pointed the finger back at Kiev.


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