MH17: MH370 families offer counselling to next-of-kin of MH17 passengers and crew

PETALING JAYA: Families of passengers and crew of the crashed Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 have offered their help to counsel to the families of those who were killed in another MAS flight, MH17 which was shot down over the Ukraine on July 17.

"No one deserves to go through what they're going through."They are like we were in the beginning: quiet and wanting their space. But we are here for them, we actually know what they're going through, we know this is so painful, so hard," said Jacquita Gonzalez, wife of MH370 in-flight supervisor Patrick Francis Gomez told The Guardian.

Gonzalez, who married Gomez at 22, 10 years after meeting him when she was 12, added that in the case of MH17, there would be some closure for the families of those on board MH17.

"I'm glad that MH17 is being settled and at least they have the remains coming back, they know where the plane is - now it's about who's at fault and who did that," said Gonzalez.

She added that there was still no closure for those presumed killed when MH370 crashed in March.

"But we are still in limbo, we don't know anything because we haven't heard anything about MH370 ... We also want closure, we want to know what happened."

MH 370 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, left the KL International Airport at 12.41am  on March 8 and disappeared from radar screens about an hour later, while over the South China Sea. It was to have arrived in Beijing at 6.30am on the same day.

A multinational search was mounted for the aircraft, first in the South China Sea and then, after it was learned that the plane had veered off course, along two corridors - the northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand and the southern corridor, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak then announced on March 24 - 17 days after the disappearance of the aircraft - that Flight MH370 "ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

It was reported that the remains of those killed on MH17 are not expected to return for many more weeks, as Dutch specialists are currently using the DNA of next-of-kin to identify the remains retrieved from sites 50km from the Russia-Ukraine border, near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.

MH17, a Boeing 777-200ER airliner was shot down on while on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The crash, which killed all 298 on board is believed to have been caused by a Buk surface to air missile.

On the return of the remains,  Murphy Govind, the brother of MH17 stewardess Angeline Premila Rajandran, said: "It is sad that the bodies will not be home before Hari Raya but there's nothing we can do. We can just hope for the best. As long as the Dutch people are doing their job identifying the bodies, we just hope that they can do it as soon as possible."