Distraught and sobbing relatives poured into Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, as the nation reeled from the news that 154 of its citizens were aboard a Malaysian plane believed to have been shot down in Ukraine.
Bewildered family members of those traveling on the ill-fated jet were whisked away into a restaurant on the upper deck of the airport, shielded from massing journalists. They then boarded buses headed for an unknown destination.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur disappeared from radar screens before crashing, with 298 people on board in eastern Ukraine.
Photo: Reuters
Pro-Russian separatists in the region and officials in Kiev blamed each other for the crash, after the plane was apparently hit by a surface-to-air missile.
Red, white and blue Dutch flags were lowered to half-mast inside the country and at embassies around the world.
“I am deeply saddened by this horrible news,” King Willem-Alexander said in a statement.
“Our thoughts go to the families, friends and colleagues of the victims, and to those who do not know yet if one of their loved ones was on board the plane,” he said.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he was “deeply shocked” by the catastrophe.
Malaysia Airlines vice president Huib Gorter told a press briefing at Schiphol that a plane would take victims’ relatives to Ukraine to visit the crash site if they wished to make the trip.
Many were stunned by the news their family and friends were on the Malaysian airliner which went down just four months after a flight from the same carrier disappeared over the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.
“This can’t be true,” Alicia de Boer said in a Facebook comment as it emerged her friend, Cor Pan, a young Dutchman, had been on the flight.
In a chilling post just before he boarded the flight, Pan posted an image of the doomed flight with the comment: “If it should disappear, this is what it looks like.”
Cor Pan, who appeared to be going on a beach holiday to Malaysia, posted the photo as a joking reference to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
Comments by Pan’s friends on Facebook suggested that he was on the MH17. Late on Thursday his picture had been shared more than 10,000 times on the social media site.
The crash resulted in the second-biggest loss of Dutch lives in an airplane disaster, after a 1977 crash of two Boeing 747 jumbo jets on the Canary Island of Tenerife that killed 238 Dutch nationals.
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS