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Indonesian victims of shot plane identified
Two of 12 Indonesian passengers aboard the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down by a ground-to-air missile in Ukraine last month, have been identified by a joint forensics team in the Netherlands, a National Police official has said
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wo of 12 Indonesian passengers aboard the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down by a ground-to-air missile in Ukraine last month, have been identified by a joint forensics team in the Netherlands, a National Police official has said.
The National Police's Disaster Victims Identification (DVI) chief, Sr. Comr. Anton Castilani, said on Thursday that the identified victims were a man and a woman.
'Their remains were still in relatively good condition. We were able to identify the female victim from her finger prints. For the male victim, we conducted tooth identification. He was also still wearing his wedding ring engraved with his wife's name and their wedding date,' Anton said in Jakarta.
Anton declined to reveal the identity of the two as their families had requested anonymity.
Anton, who joined the identification process, said the remains of the two would probably be flown to their respective families after the identification process of the remaining 298 victims on board the downed airplane had been completed.
The Transportation Ministry reported that 12 Indonesian citizens were on board the ill-fated Boeing 777-200 jetliner.
Among the Indonesian passengers on board the plane were Supartini, a native of Karanganyar, Central Java, who had been working as a housemaid in The Hague for the past three-and-a-half years and Hendry, a native of Medan, North Sumatra, who had been in the Netherlands only two months before the crash.
Another victim of the crash was Charles Tamtelahitu, 63, brother of PT Humpuss Intermoda Transportasi president director Theo Lekatompessy.
The preliminary results of an inquiry into the crash of flight MH17 will be published in the first week of September, Agence France Presse has reported.
The preliminary report will contain information from various sources, including the black boxes, transcripts of interactions between the crew and flight dispatchers and satellite imagery.
Ongoing fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian government forces had initially prevented investigators from reaching the crash site, but Dutch, Australian and Malaysian forensics experts eventually managed to make it to the area to look for human remains and personal belongings.
