Flight MH17: Passengers may have known their fate

A passenger on board flight MH17 was found wearing an oxygen mask, suggesting those on board the doomed flight knew of their fate.

The body of an Australian victim was later found wearing an oxygen mask.

According to the Guardian, the passenger, an Australian national, did not have the mask on his face but around his neck.

Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch national prosecutor's office, which is carrying out a criminal investigation into the disaster added that Dutch forensic experts investigated the mask "for fingerprints, saliva and DNA and that did not produce any results. So it is not known how or when that mask got around the neck of the victim."

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans blurted out the discovery on a chat show on Wednesday, reports the Mirror.

Although the victim's family had been told, the discovery was kept quiet until now.

Timmermans quickly apologised to the victim's relatives, saying: "The last thing I want is to add to their suffering in any way. I shouldn't have said it.

"I have an enormous amount of sympathy for the next-of-kin. I shouldn't have said it."

All 298 on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed.

De Bruin added that no other bodies recovered from the wreckage were found wearing masks.

Dutch air crash investigators said last month the plane was probably struck by a number of "high-energy objects from outside the aircraft", which some aviation experts say is consistent with a missile strike.

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