All 298 on board MH17 identified

Flowers are placed on a plane engine at the crash site of a Malaysia Airlines jet near the village of Hrabove, eastern Ukraine, Saturday, July 19, 2014. World leaders demanded Friday that pro-Russia rebels who control the eastern Ukraine crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 give immediate, unfettered access to independent investigators to determine who shot down the plane. AP Photo

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Saturday confirmed the nationalities of all the 298 people on-board flight MH17 which crashed in Ukraine Thursday.

A statement released on MAS' official website said the identified passengers and crew comprised 192 Dutch (including 1 dual Netherlands/USA citizen), 44 Malaysians (including 15 crew members and two infants), 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians (including an infant), 10 British (including 1 dual UK/S. Africa citizen), four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one person from New Zealand.

MAS is working closely with the respective embassies to notify the next-of-kin of the deceased.The Kuala Lumpur-bound Malaysia Airlines MH17 jetliner crashed Thursday in Ukraine near the Russian border, with all the 298 passengers and crew members on board reportedly killed. It was believed to have been shot down.

This is the second major tragedy for Malaysia Airlines this year after flight MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board went missing while going from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing March 8 and remains untraced till date.

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