Kharkiv - Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders has said he hopes that experts will be able to identify all victims of the crash of the Malaysian Boeing 777 aircraft, which occurred in Donetsk region in July 2014.
“Nine plane passengers are still unaccounted for. We cannot say at this moment in any certain way… at what moment and even if we can recover the last nine, but we will do everything we can in cooperation with the authorities here to make that happen,” he told reporters in Kharkiv on Saturday, Nov. 8.
Kharkiv Regional Governor Ihor Baluta who also participated in the briefing, in turn, said that five containers with the remains of the victims were sent from Kharkiv to Eindhoven (the Netherlands) on Saturday.
“If you look at the map of the plane crash, there is one sector that is yet poorly examined. It is roughly about 18-19 percent of the area,” Baluta said.
The Malaysia Airlines MH17 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 people on board, including 192 Dutch nationals.
An investigative team has managed to identify the remains of 289 casualties so far.
The Dutch Safety Board’s preliminary report said earlier that the aircraft had experienced no mechanical failure and broke up in midair after being struck by “a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.”
