Postmortem completed on 150 MH17 passengers

The Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team, entrusted by three countries to identify the Malaysia Airlines MH17 passenger bodies, has conducted postmortems on 150 complete bodies and 300 body parts. Malaysian Health Minister Dr. S Subramaniam said about 600 post-mortem files have been opened, and the body parts were among the 600 parts contained in 226 coffins that arrived in the Netherlands from the crash site in eastern Ukraine. "The post-mortem is expected to be completed in one or two weeks, after which the matching process will be conducted based on the DNA samples of immediate family members,” he said Wednesday. "Of the 600 parts, post-mortems had been conducted on 450 of them, of which 150 were complete bodies, while 300 were various incomplete body parts," he added. The minister said the process of matching the remains with the DNA taken from the respective family members is expected to take three weeks more. After the completion of the process, Subramaniam said the respective governments from the nationalities of the passengers would decide on the process of bringing home the remains of the victims.

"Family members of some of the victims want the bodies to be brought home as soon as possible, while others want the bodies to be cremated there [in the Netherlands]. The government will consider all views," he underlined.

Outside of Malaysians, nationals from the Netherlands, Australia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, Canada and New Zealand were among the 298 passengers and crew on board.