As the world comes to terms with the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on Thursday last week, facts on victims have emerged to indicate that whole families perished in the attack.
Most heart rending is a family of six (a couple and four children) namely Tambi Jiee, Ariza Ghazalee, Muhammad Afif, Afruz Tambi, Marsha Azmeena and Muhammad Afzal.
They had been living in Kazakhstan, where Tambi Jiee worked for an oil company, and they were on a short vacation in Europe before moving to Kuala Lumpur, according to Malaysian news media reports. Before they boarded the plane in Amsterdam, Mr. Tambi’s wife, Ariza Ghazalee, posted a photo of their suitcases on Facebook, with a caption saying they were starting their new journey. The couple enjoyed travel, posting photos from trips to China, Egypt and Greece, and Mr. Tambi recently posted a photo of the family in Germany. The oldest of the four children, Muhammad Afif, 19, was a student at Taylor’s University in Malaysia. He was planning to study architecture at the university’s campus near Kuala Lumpur this fall. Mr. Tambi had worked as a manager in the oil industry for many years after studying industrial engineering at the University of Alabama and manufacturing systems at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
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*Cor Schilder, 33 and Neeltje Tol, 30 Florists – Netherlands
Mr. Schilder and his girlfriend, Ms. Tol, owners of a flower shop in the northern town of Volendam, were going on vacation to Bali, according to Channel 4 News. Mr. Schilder, an amateur musician, posted a photo on Facebook of the same type of plane owned by Malaysia Airlines that vanished in March. “In case it goes missing, this is what it looks like,” Mr. Schilder wrote as a caption. Two months before the flight, Mr. Schilder posted pictures of an Indonesian tourist resort on his Facebook page. “We will stay in a villa with a private pool with rose petals floating in it,” he wrote in Dutch on May 17. “We won’t leave before all those petals have withered away.” It would have been his first visit to the resort, comments on his Facebook page showed.
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*Willem Witteveen, 62; Lidwien Heerkens; Marit Senator – Netherlands
Mr. Witteveen, a Dutch senator, legal scholar and author, was on board with his wife, Lidwien Heerkens, and their daughter Marit. Their son, Freek, was not on the plane. Mr. Witteveen had worked since 1990 as a law school professor at Tilburg University, where his daughter was a second-year student in the humanities school. He “was a scholar par excellence, a team player, a true colleague in the best sense of the word,” his colleagues at Tilburg’s law school said in a statement. “As an academic, Willem had a keen sense of social responsibility.” He practiced Universal Sufism, a religious philosophy connected to Islam that is practiced in Malaysia. It is not clear if the family was traveling to Malaysia or if Kuala Lumpur was a layover stop. “This loss is really unbelievable,” Ankie Broekers-Knol, the president of the Dutch Senate, said in a statement. ****************** [eap_ad_1] *Tessa van der Sande, 27 Program Officer – Netherlands
Amnesty International Netherlands said in a Facebook post that one of its employees, Tessa van der Sande, had been aboard the doomed jet along with members of her family. The human rights organization said her work was focused on Africa, and an online profile for Ms. van der Sande indicated the early stages of a career in international affairs. ***************
*Albert and Maree Rizk Real estate agent – Australia
Albert Rizk, a real estate agent, and his wife, Maree, both in their early 50s, lived in Melbourne, Australia, and were returning home after a monthlong vacation in Europe, friends and relatives said. Phil Lithgow, the president of the Sunbury Football Club, said the family was involved with the club; Maree as a volunteer in the canteen, Albert as a team sponsor and a member of the club’s committee, and their son, James, as a player. “They were very lovely people,” Mr. Lithgow told the Associated Press. “You wouldn’t hear a bad word about them — very generous with their time in the community, very community-minded, and just really very entertaining people to be with.” They are survived by their son and their daughter, Vanessa. Ms. Rizk’s stepmother’s brother and his wife were aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. “We thought it was unusual they would fly Malaysia because that earlier flight had gone down,” Mr. Lithgow said.
