You're reading: Remains of two MH17 passengers still unidentified

KHARKIV – The bodies of two passengers who were on board the Malaysian Airlines' Boeing which crashed in Donetsk region last summer have remained unidentified to date, Dutch Minister of Security and Justice Gerard Adriaan van der Steur said.

“Two passengers remain unidentified. We hope that the two who have so far remained unidentified will be identified among those remains that are now undergoing the identification process and those that will be sent (from Kharkiv to the Netherlands) today,” the minister told reporters at Kharkiv International Airport on May 2.

Today, seven containers with the remains of the crash victims will be sent from Kharkiv to Eindhoven, he also said.

“All these remains will undergo the identification process and subsequently be returned to the families. The crash victims’ personal belongings, too, will be returned to the families after the identification,” the ministers aid.

The two passengers whose remains have yet to be identified are Dutch nationals, he said.

The briefing was immediately followed by a farewell ceremony on the airfield to bid farewell to the crash victims’ remains, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reported. The ceremony was attended by the Dutch minister of security and justice, deputy head of Kharkiv Regional State Administration Mark Bekker, as well as ambassadors of the countries whose citizens were killed in the crash.

The Boeing 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines was flying from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) when it was shot down in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. All 298 people on board were killed. They included 192 Dutch nationals (one also had a U.S. citizenship), 44 Malaysians, including 15 crew members, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, ten Britons (one also had a South African citizenship), four Germans and four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.