Police yesterday located a man surnamed Tsai (蔡) to inform him that a postcard addressed to him had been found in the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines aircraft shot down in Ukraine on Thursday.
The postcard was sent from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on July 10 and addressed to Tsai in Taoyuan County’s Gueishan Township (龜山). The message was in Chinese and related the sender’s trip to the Netherlands.
The postcard was discovered among the piles of mail retrieved from the wreckage of flight M17, which was shot down by a missile in Ukraine while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
All 298 passengers aboard were killed.
None of those on the jet were Taiwanese, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday, citing information released by the Malaysian carrier.
Tsai told police the postcard was sent to him by a friend who was on a trip to Europe. The friend, whose identity was not released by police, wrote the postcard the second day after arriving in the Netherlands.
In related news, the Civil Aeronautics Administration on Saturday said that following the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight, the number of international flights using Taiwanese airspace could grow by 8 percent to more than 140,000 flights this year.
With the crash raising safety concerns about using Ukrainian airspace, many airline carriers have decided to bypass the region, which could result in losses in air navigation fees for Ukraine, Lee said.
Flight operators that use Taiwan’s airspace are expected to pay air navigation facility charges totaling about NT$1.4 billion (US$46.6 million) to the government this year, agency official Lee Chien-kuo (李建國) said.
The carriers that use Taiwanese airspace are mainly from Hong Kong, and southeast and northeast Asia, Lee added.
It takes approximately 50 minutes to traverse the nation’s flight information region, he added.
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