MH17 Disaster: Dutch Minister Regrets Revealing Passenger 'Wore Oxygen Mask' on Talk Show

Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans apologized to the families of the 298 victims of flight MH17 disaster Thursday for revealing on a television show the previous night that one of the Australian passengers aboard the doomed Malaysia Airlines jet had donned an oxygen mask before the fatal crash.

Regretting the remark, Timmermans said: "The last thing I want is to add to their suffering in any way. I shouldn't have said it," he said in an official statement that was released hours after he made the comment on the Pauw Talk Show on Dutch TV, BBC reports.

This revelation is extremely disturbing as it suggests that some on board might have known what was there in their fate, a Dutch official disclosed, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Timmermans' comments were considered to imply that not all of the passengers had died immediately after the missile struck the aircraft in eastern Ukraine, some might have been conscious, Euro News reports. The public prosecutor stated that the passenger had the oxygen mask around his neck but not on his mouth as the minister suggested.

Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch National Prosecutor's Office - which is carrying out a criminal investigation into the disaster, said Dutch forensic experts investigated the mask "for fingerprints, saliva and DNA and that did not produce any results. So it is not known how or when that mask got around the neck of the victim," New York Daily News reports.

The aircraft was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur July 17, when it went down over the rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine. It was stated that a missile had struck the jet; but, the pro-Russian separatist leaders denied shooting it down with a missile.