This article is more than
7 year oldWhen he walked onto the crash site, Robby Oehlers was hit by grief and the smell of kerosene. "[The smell] was still so penetrating, it made my eyes burn," Oehlers says.
He had a list of items that his cousin Daisy and her boyfriend Bryce had brought with them. "They had travelled with a light blue suitcase, which was one of the first things I saw. I took a picture and sent it home, but it wasn't theirs."
Three months before, on July 17, 2014, Daisy, 20, and Bryce, 23, had boarded flight MH17 on their way to a holiday in Bali. But about three hours into the flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Boeing 777 was hit by what an international team of investigators have said was a surface-to-air BUK missile launched from an area in eastern Ukraine that, at the time, was controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
The Malaysia Airlines aeroplane disintegrated in the sky and there were no survivors among the 298 passengers and staff.
Oehlers, a singer from the Netherlands, had grown impatient in the months after the downing of the flight. When, in October, Daisy's remains still had not been identified, he decided to take matters into his own hands and visit the crash site in hopes of finding a trace of his disappeared relative.
Read more (...)
Newer articles