Grieving families have recalled their final memories of their loved ones on the anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
Wednesday marks 10 years since the flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 on board, including 38 Australian residents and citizens.
The plane was shot down by a missile as it flew over conflict-ravaged eastern Ukraine, which was held then by pro-Russian separatists.
A joint investigation into the shooting led by the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine concluded the missile system was transported from Russia to a farm field near Pervomaiskyi in eastern Ukraine.
It’s taken 10 years for David Horder to publicly open up about the unimaginable loss of his parents Susan and Howard.
Days earlier, the couple who had been married for 42 years, had spent a week with David in London, where he was living at the time.
They then headed to Netherlands for the final leg of their European adventure to attend several Andre Rieu shows.
The couple before boarding the ill-fated flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, headed home to Brisbane.
Mr Horder sent his parents a text, saying ‘Have a great flight.. see you soon…’
Susan and Howard (pictured) who were on flight MH17 when it was downed on July 17, 2014
Susan and Howard Horder caught up with their son David (right) in Europe a week before the tragedy
‘Dad responded with ‘we’re just boarding… see you at the wedding of the year’ and mum responded with something else,’ he told A Current Affair.
Mr Horder thought he was going to see them at his brother’s wedding in Bali later that year, but he never saw them again.
‘I could never have predicted how messy, dark, complicated it was going to get,’ he said.
Mr Horder said he ‘instantly’ knew his parents were on that plane as soon as he read the news notifications on his phone.
‘I’d be lying if I said I was clinging on to hope,’ he told the program.
‘I turned on the TV and saw that dark plume of smoke.
‘The world completely changed.’
Mr Horder said tears, confusion and questions followed, and an unlikely friendship with a detective who supported him through what he described as a ‘massive, complicated blur’.
Jack O’Brien almost missed his flight, and his parents are still wishing he had
Jack O’Brien’s parents, Meryn and Jon, were excited to be reunited their son who had spent seven weeks backpacking around Europe.
The 25-year-old from Sydney’s west made a mad dash through Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, just catching his flight, which had been delayed by 13 minutes.
A decade on, his family are still being haunted by the idea that their son could still be alive if he had never boarded flight MH17.
Mr O’Brien recalled turning on the radio while making a cup of tea to the shocking news that a Malaysia Airlines plane had crashed and that there were no survivors.
He and his wife Meryn shared their story as part of a new five-part podcast from the Australian Federal Police called Search Among the Sunflowers, which was released this week.
‘I think I instantly cried out, ‘That’s Jack’s plane’,’ Mr O’Brien recalled.
‘And I didn’t know Meryn had the radio on in the bedroom and had heard the same thing.
‘So pretty much that was the end of our life as we’d known it.’
Jack (pictured in Paris) spent seven weeks backpacking around Europe before his life was cut short
The couple have seen the CCTV footage of their son’s final moments and said it was ‘probably one of the most piercing and excruciating things’ realising how close he was to missing the plane.
‘The last shot was this walkway thing and there was no queuing because everybody had boarded and it was just this empty walkway with Jack from behind just running by that stage to get on the plane,’ Ms O’Brien said.
‘I just thought ‘Why didn’t you fall over? Why didn’t you break your leg or something?’.’
‘I mean, if we’d got a phone call from Amsterdam to say, ‘I’ve broken my leg’, we would’ve thought, ‘Oh, that’s terrible’. You know?
‘But now, knowing what’s happened, I just thought, that was terrible.’
In November 2022, The District Court of The Hague determined Russian military and intelligence operatives Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin and Sergey Nikolayevich Dubinskiy and pro-Russian Ukrainian Leonid Volodymyrovych Kharchenko were guilty of downing the aircraft.
The Hague sentenced the men to life in prison, but the EU does not have an extradition treaty with Russia and the men remain at large, believed to be in Russia.
A fourth man, Russian Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted on all charges.
The podcast is available on the AFP website.
The ill-fated flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine by ‘a rebel missile’
