A video believed to have been recorded by a passenger from doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday shows passengers in the plane moments before takeoff.
“Bismillah… #hatiadasikitgentar (In the name of God… feeling a little bit nervous),” passenger Md Ali Md Salim captioned the 14-second video that was uploaded to his Instagram account at noon Amsterdam time under the handle @masa1777, reports Malaysia’s Bernama state news agency.
The brief video offers a haunting glimpse of riders settling in and stowing luggage in the overhead bins before the doomed flight took off.
Salim’s friend Mohn Zaem Nordin, 24, shared the clip on his Instagram later in the day.
“When I saw the video which had been uploaded about 15 hours earlier, I was shocked and did not think he would be on the plane,” he told Bernama.
Salim was a doctoral student at a university in Amsterdam, he added.
“We first met when he was working as a fellow in UKM (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), Kuala Lumpur branch and he was friendly and easy to get along with,” he said.
Salim’s brother, Md Zaki Md Salim, said he was coming home for the holidays.
“My brother was very excited to be back for Raya with the family and should have arrived today,” he told Astro Awani.
One week before the flight, Salim expressed to his brother that he wanted to buy each of his family members a pair of pants and shoes in Amsterdam.
“He even managed to ask for our sizes for the items to be purchased,” Md Zaki Md Salim said.
The Boeing 777-200 aircraft was shot down by a ground-to-air missile. All of the plane’s 298 passengers perished in the crash.
