Saturday, July 19, 2014

Farewell! Passengers Profile of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

Among the 298 people aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were a renowned AIDS researcher, a Dutch senator and an Australian novelist. Malaysian authorities have reported 193 Dutch victims, including an American-dutch citizen; 43 Malaysians, including the crew; and 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 10 Britons, including a British-South African citizen, four Belgians, four Germans, three Filipinos, one Canadian and one New Zealander.

Following are profiles of a few of the victims who have been identified. If you knew someone on the flight, we invite you to share your recollections. We will update this as more information on the victims becomes available.

 

Joep Lange, 59

AIDS Researcher - Netherlands


Jean Ayissi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Dr. Lange, a renowned AIDS researcher from the Netherlands, was traveling aboard the Malaysia Airlines jet with his partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, to the International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Lange had worked in the field of infectious diseases since the early years of the AIDS epidemic and had focused his efforts on making treatments cheaper in poor nations in Asia and Africa. “Joep was a person who knew no barriers,” said Dr. M.M. Levi in a statement on behalf of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, where Dr. Lange worked.
  • Jacqueline van Tongeren, 64

    Communications Director - Netherlands


    PharmAccess Foundation
    Ms. van Tongeren's interest in H.I.V. began in the 1980s, when she was a nurse for patients with the virus. More recently, she was the communications director at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development and a member of the board of Art AIDS, which invites artists to produce work dealing with AIDS. Her interest in art dated to the 1970s, when she ran a gallery in Amsterdam. Ms. van Tongeren was traveling on Flight 17 with her partner, Dr. Joep Lange, a prominent AIDS researcher.
  • Karlijn Keijzer, 25

    Student - Netherlands


    Indiana University
    To those who knew her at Indiana University, Ms. Keijzer seemed to excel at everything she did, from her work as a doctoral student in chemistry to her leadership on the university’s rowing team."She was a kind, happy young woman full of ideas about the future,” Mu-Hyun Baik, Ms. Keijzer's doctoral adviser in a statement. Before Ms. Keijzer left on vacation, she was working on a research project that had the potential to help cancer patients and people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her academic adviser said.
  • 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.
  • Willem Witteveen, 62; Lidwien Heerkens; Marit

    Senator - Netherlands


    Paul Dijkstra/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
    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.
  • Pim de Kuijer, 32

    AIDS Activist - Netherlands


    Mr. Kuijer, a Dutch AIDS activist and former European Commission diplomat, was traveling aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight en route to the AIDS 2014 conference in Melbourne, Australia, according to reports in the Dutch news media. “Pim believed in understanding between countries, the rule of law and equality for all, and fought for his values through his work and his political activities,” Lousewies van der Laan, a Dutch politician for whom Mr. Kuijer once interned, said in a statement. Hundreds of people were expressing disbelief and sorrow on a Facebook post that Mr. Kuijer put up from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport before boarding the flight.
  • Martine de Schutter

    AIDS Activist - Netherlands


    On her LinkedIn page, Ms. de Schutter described herself as a cultural anthropologist specializing in gender and sexual health, including H.I.V. and AIDS. “Throughout my (professional) life, I hope to contribute to making the world a better place to live, work and love,” she wrote. She was a program manager at Bridging the Gap, which offers targeted H.I.V. prevention and treatment.

  • 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.
  • Quinn Lucas Schansman, 19

    Student - United States and the Netherlands


    Mr. Schansman was born in New York while his father was working for the Dutch government. The family moved back to the Netherlands when he was only a few years old, and he lived the rest of his life in Europe, said Katinka Wallace, a relative. He had dual Dutch and American citizenship, as President Obama noted when he announced Mr. Schansman’s death on Friday. Mr. Schansman’s grandfather was born in Indonesia, and the family had planned a three-week vacation to the country, Ms. Wallace said. Mr. Schansman’s parents were already there, waiting for him to arrive. He was studying business in Amsterdam and played soccer for the Olympia ’25 club in Hilversum, the Netherlands, relatives said. His Facebook page, last updated on June 20, mentions his girlfriend, features the assortment of photos expected of a college student and, now, includes notes of grief and loss.
  • Nur Shazana Binti Mohamed Salleh, 31

    Flight attendant - Malaysia


    Ms. Salleh, who went by Shazana Salleh on her Facebook page, was a flight attendant and one of 15 Malaysian crew members on board the plane that crashed. Her father, Mohd Salleh, said it was her dream to become a flight attendant and to travel the world, The Malaysian Insider reported. "She went through so many interviews to finally land this job," he said. She had worked at Malaysia Airlines since 2004 after studying at a college in Penang, Malaysia, according to her Facebook page. Last weekend, she posted that she was watching the final game of the World Cup in Kuala Lumpur.
  • Liam Davison, 56 and Frankie, 54

    Novelist - Australia


    University Of Queensland Press
    Mr. Davison, an Australian novelist, and his wife, Frankie, 54, were among the victims of Flight 17, the Australian newspaper The Age reported. Mr. Davison’s work earned a number of accolades, including a National Book Council Banjo Award for Fiction for his novel “Soundings” in 1993, according to his publisher. Toorak College, a school in southern Australia where Ms. Davison taught literature, said she was “much loved” in a Facebook post, which was drawing scores of expressions of grief from students, colleagues and others. The Davisons had two children, Milly and Sam, the school said.
  • Nick Norris, 68; Mo, 12; Evie, 10; and Otis Maslin, 8

    Australia


    Nick Norris was aboard the flight with his grandchildren, three Australian siblings — Mo, 12, Evie 10, and Otis Maslin, 8, reports in the Australian news media said. The children’s parents, Rin Norris and Anthony Maslin, had stayed behind to extend their vacation in Europe while the children had to return to school, the reports said. Ms. Norris’s sister Natalia Gemmell told the Australian news site PerthNow that the children were “beautiful, beautiful kids; just gentle, clever, beautiful kids.”
  • Glenn Raymond Thomas, 49

    Media Officer - Britain


    World Health Organization
    Mr. Thomas, a media officer for the World Health Organization, was traveling to an AIDS conference in Australia. Originally from Blackpool, England, he was a former BBC journalist who joined the W.H.O and worked there for more than a decade. “His twin sister says he died doing what he loved,” according to a W.H.O. statement. Colleagues at W.H.O. remembered him as having a “ready laugh” and a “passion for public health.” He was in charge of promoting the organization’s latest report on H.I.V.
  • Andrei Anghel, 24

    Student - Canada


    Mr. Anghel was a medical student leaving for a trip to Bali with his German girlfriend, Olga Ioppa, according to the Toronto Star. He was the only Canadian on the flight. Mr. Anghel wanted to help find a cure for cancer and had been studying at the Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Romania. His sister Lexi Anghel said he had been looking forward to his "dream vacation." "They wanted to go hiking in Bali," she said. "He loved the outdoors and he loved beaches.” On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Anghel said he was passionate about "the science of living things, always questioning."



  • Repost from NYTimes

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