PETALING JAYA: It was a little past 10 at night, and everyone at the office thought the day was done.
The newspaper had been put to bed early – the deadline was 11.30pm – and there were smiles all around. Not for long.
Suddenly, the office was buzzing. Everyone talking and phones were ringing – another Malaysia Airlines plane was in trouble.
MH17, a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had been shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine. A total of 298 people were on board. Forty-three of them were Malaysians, including all 15 crew members. All were dead.
A short story about a stricken plane was out in the wire services. And this was just four months and 10 days after MH370 had gone missing with 239 people on board.
As reporters and editors rushed to get whatever news they could to bring the newspaper up to date, assistant chief photographer Kamarul Ariffin received a call from photo chief Ng Kok Leong.
“Do you want to go to Ukraine?” he asked.
Kamarul, now 55, had no hesitation in saying yes. He said he had photographed the war in Libya and that was why Ng asked him.
Kamarul’s visa was stamped at the Ukrainian embassy at midnight. His flight left at three in the morning.
“When the boss asks, it tests you as a photographer,” he says.
“Anyone can take pictures. But something like that, you can’t buy.”
To reach the wreckage, his team had to clear six roadblocks in a war zone near the Russian border.
“In a country at war, there’s no law,” he says. “If something goes wrong, you’re gone.”
The plane had come down in fields of sunflowers. Days after the crash, parts of the wreckage and of the dead had still not been cleared, said Kamarul.
“Everything had just burned,” he said. “There was the smell of petrol, and the smell of the dead, mixed together.”
The danger never let up. While he was working, a Russian military truck came down the road. Afraid of being seen, Kamarul lay flat in the sunflowers and stayed there for almost an hour.
“When you’re that scared,” he says, “you don’t even feel your body aching.”
There was one moment he still cannot explain. He was photographing a pair of pink Hello Kitty shoes, set neatly in the grass, perhaps a little girl’s.
As he took the picture, he heard a child crying, a girl, maybe five or six years old.
He looked up. There was no child. There were no people at all, only the things they had left behind.
“Some people say I’m making it up,” he says. “But it’s true. Whenever I see Hello Kitty, I think of MH17.”
Almost 12 years on, that front page with Kamarul’s photograph remains one of The Star’s most enduring.
Loong Meng Yee was another editor who had been looking forward to some peace and quiet on that fateful night. She had spent 12 hours on the desk and was winding down as – or so she thought. She was sadly mistaken.
When the news broke, her re-ction was disbelief.
“It felt like a cruel joke,” she says.
“We hadn’t got over MH370, and now another plane? You have never had one country or one airline lose two planes months apart.”
There was no time to even ponder about it. Within the hour, it was confirmed – a MAS aircraft had indeed been shot down over Ukraine.
The newsroom was stunned, but the job had to go on.
The front page they had finished was now passe. It had to be all redone. The deadline was 11.30pm and the team had barely one hour.
Even then, it was not a full team.
“Two sub-editors, one or two reporters, one copy clearer, that’s all we had,” says Loong, now the newspaper’s Executive Editor.
“But in that tense moment, when people wanted to know why, when and what, it was our job to bring people the truth,” she says.
With a skeleton staff, they put together what little they could source from the wires and officials with the headline: MH17 down.
There was a picture of a plane that had become just debris, and officials at the scene. Kamarul’s pictures, that came later, were even more heart-wrenching.
