Dutch Senator killed on flight MH17

The First Chamber is mourning a senator who was killed on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was downed in Ukraine yesterday.

Senator Willem Witteveen is among the Dutch nationals who died when their flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

“Prof. dr. W.J. Witteveen (1952) was a member of the PvdA faction of the First Chamber since January 15 2013,” the First Chamber wrote on its website this morning. Witteveen had previously also served from June 8 1999 to June 12 2007.

The Chamber said that speaker Ankie Broekers-Knol was shocked when she was informed by the Minister of Home Affairs of his tragic passing.

Witteveen was a married father of two, a son and a daughter, and had a personal philosophy connected to Sufaism, an offshoot of Islam, according to the Dutch senate. It is not yet clear  if he was traveling to Malaysia, an Islamic state where Sufism is practiced openly, or if Kuala Lumpur was a stopover.

The Boeing 777 aircraft that crashed after it was allegedly hit by a missile, also killed at least 189 other Dutch nationals, among them AIDS researcher Joep Lange, teacher Bart Lambregts and at least 16 people from Brabant.