It has been a pretty terrible year for Malaysian Airlines (MAS). With a mere four months gap since the disastrous MH370 missing incident, MAS is currently facing with another challenge. To it's chagrin, one of MAS flight, MH17, which was scheduled to depart from Amsterdam on 17th of July 2014 for Kuala Lumpur was shot down. I repeat ' IT WAS BEING SHOT DOWN' ! Upon investigation, it was found out that the plane was brought down by ground-to-air missile at rebel-held territory in Eastern Ukraine! A total of 298 passengers were on board (including 15 crew).

MH17 was carrying 193 Dutch nationals, 43 Malaysians (including crew), 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 10 Britons, 4 Germans, 4 Belgians, 3 Filipinos, 1 Canadian and 1 New Zealander on board.Malaysia has released a full passenger manifest. The crashed plane was Boeing 777-220ER similar to MH370 which disappeared while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing back in March. It departed from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport at 10.15 GMT on 17th of July and was due to arrive at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 22.10 GMT. However, the airline lost contact four hours later at 14.15 GMT when MH17 was passing through Russia-Ukraine border. According to the authorities, the culprits were Russian terrorists who had already brought down an Ukrainian army  plane several days ago.