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MH17 Passenger Found Wearing Oxygen Mask, Says Dutch Minister

Revelation could indicate that passengers did not die instantly when the plane was downed over conflict-torn east Ukraine.

A passenger onboard the MH17 plane that crashed during its flight over war-torn east Ukraine was wearing an oxygen mask, the outgoing Dutch Foreign Minister, Frans Timmermans, has said.

The implication of the statement was that the 298 passengers on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur might not have died immediately when the plane was hit, as was originally believed.

"Did they hold the hands of their loved ones, did they hug their children?" Timmermans said in an interview on the Dutch television show PAUW on Wednesday night, painting a harrowing image of a possible scenario of the final seconds of the victims' lives.

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However, Robert Mann president of R.W Mann & Co, an airline industry consultancy service, told Bloomberg that although the oxygen mask on a victim pointed to the passengers having "time to react to mask availability and don a mask" it remained plausible that a detached mask could have become tangled around the victim's neck in the devastation that followed.

Wednesday was not the first time that Timmersmans — who has since apologized for upsetting victims' relatives — has made emotive statements about the crash. In an address to the UN Security Council just four days after the plane was downed, the Dutch politician, who will soon leave his post to take up a new position as the deputy to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, imagined the horror passengers could have felt "when they knew the plane was going down" and wondered whether they had the opportunity to look in each other's eyes "one final time, in an unarticulated goodbye".

A statement released by the Dutch public prosecutor confirmed an oxygen mask was found on a passenger amidst the wreckage although a spokesman said it was around the victim's neck, not their mouth and had been sent for DNA and fingerprint testing. Dutch media have reported that victim wearing the oxygen mask was an Australian national.

All passengers on board the flight were killed in the incident, including 83 children.

A preliminary report into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 released on September 9 found that the plane broke up in mid-air after being hit by a "large number of high-energy objects" that "pierced the plane at high speed." The document, released by the Dutch Safety Board, said that there was no evidence of "technical or human error."

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The initial findings of the investigation are consistent with the claims made by Kiev and its Western allies, who say they have strong evidence that the pro-Russia rebels fighting government forces shot down the plane with a Buk anti-aircraft missile, but the report stopped short of attributing blame for who fired the shot that hit the flight.

The team looking into the incident have been forced to conduct much of their investigation from photographs after heavy fighting in the area has prevented experts from accessing the site to carry out a full examination of the wreckage and debris from the crash, which is spread out over several square miles.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the seating position of the mask-wearing passenger can be compared to the mapped catalog of wreckage from the crash site. Whilst the oxygen mask is unlikely to have a significant influence on the direction of the investigation team's inquiries, the WSJ says it may provide insights into the final moments of the doomed passengers onboard the flight.

A de facto no fly zone is now in force over Ukraine's east as most major airline carriers immediately began re-routing their flights following the fatal crash. At least a dozen Ukrainian fighter jets had already been downed by the pro-Russia forces fighting the government in the region during the weeks prior to the MH17 tragedy.

Despite a ceasefire signed by all warring parties in the conflict on September 5, violence has continued to flare along the frontline of fighting in east Ukraine.

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A major hotspot is Donetsk airport where shelling by both sides is a near-daily occurrence. At least $205 million was spent renovating the airport prior to the recent Euro 2012 soccer tournament but several months of heavy fighting in the area has now reduced the building's impressive glass structure to rubble.

Misfired shells have repeatedly hit the nearby residential district of Kyivskiy in the northwest of Donetsk city, on one occasion killing at least nine people when a bus and school playground were hit.

However, despite the ongoing clashes Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, whose self-named party is fighting the upcoming election on a campaign with the supposed peace deal at its center, has not yet declared the official end of the ceasefire. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for October 26.

The overall monthly civilian casualty rate has dropped sharply in the month since the peace deal came into effect, the latest United Nations statistics released on Tuesday showed, though the conflict is still claiming an average of 10 lives per day.

Since fighting broke out in mid-April an estimated 3,660 people are thought to have been killed and a further one million displaced by the conflict.

A full report into the downing of MH17 is expected by the end of the year the team investigating the crash have said. So far only 262 bodies of the 298 passengers onboard the flight have been identified. The crash, which killed more than 190 Dutch nationals, has hit the Netherlands hard but Timmersman said that he hoped the country would be able to move forward from the disaster. "There is a life before and after MH17" said the Dutch politician.