MH17 revelation: Passenger ‘wore oxygen mask’ before crash in Ukraine

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans has revealed that one of the 298 people killed in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane over eastern Ukraine on July 17 was wearing an oxygen mask. This casts doubt on the theory that all on board died instantly when the plane was hit by a missile. An initial report last month said flight MH17 broke up in mid-air after being hit by “objects” that “pierced the plane at high velocity”. Pro Russian rebel leaders deny shooting it down.

Did you know that someone was found with an oxygen mask over his mouth? So someone had the time to do that.

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans

In his address to the Security Council, Mr Timmermans imagined the horror felt by the passengers “when they knew the plane was going down” and wondered whether they had looked each other in the eyes “one final time, in an unarticulated goodbye”. He acknowledged that those on board, 196 of them Dutch, would not have seen the missile hit the plane. The official inquiry into the MH17 disaster has not made any mention of an oxygen mask being found on one of the victims. But several experts have concluded that the plane would have disintegrated too quickly for the passengers to have known anything about it. The plane had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.

How terrible it must have been, when they knew that the plane [was going to crash]. Did they hold their loved ones’ hands, did they press their children to their hearts, look each other in the eye a last time?

Frans Timmermans

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