3 Filipinos on downed Malaysian plane

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) confirmed that three Filipinos were on board the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that was shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine on Thursday.

In a phone-patch interview on ANC's Headstart, DFA Spokesman Charles Jose said there are no details yet on the identities of the three Filipinos.

Malaysia Airlines said the downed plane was carrying 298 people (not 295 as earlier reported) on Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After leaving Amsterdam at 12:15 p.m. local time, the aircraft was due to land at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 6:10 a.m. local time the following day.

The carrier said it was notified by Ukrainian authorities that they lost contact with the plane when it was 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Tamak waypoint, approximately 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Ukraine-Russia border.

The plane started descending 50 kilometers before entering Russian airspace, and was subsequently found burning on the ground in Ukrainian territory, according to the Interfax news agency.

The plane disappeared from radar at 10,000 meters and then crashed near the city of Shakhtarsk in Ukraine's Donetsk region, the news agency reported, citing Ukrainian law enforcement authorities.

Bodies, debris and burning wreckage of the Boeing 777 were strewn over a field near the rebel-held village of Hrabove in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border, where fighting has raged for months.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden described the plane as having been "blown out of the sky."

The aircraft appeared to have broken up before impact, and there were large pieces of the plane that bore the red, white and blue markings of Malaysia Airlines — now familiar worldwide because of the carrier's still-missing jetliner from earlier this year.

There was no sign of any survivors from Flight 17. Malaysia's prime minister said there was no distress call before the plane went down and that the flight route was declared safe by the International Civil Aviation Organization.

An adviser to Ukraine's interior minister said the plane was shot down with a missile, but gave no proof. In a counterclaim, a pro-Moscow separatist leader said he was certain that it was Ukrainian troops who downed the airliner, but also offered no explanation or proof. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denied his country's armed forces fired on any aerial targets.

Poroshenko called the incident an "act of terrorism" and demanded an international investigation. He insisted his forces did not shoot down the plane.

President Barack Obama called the crash a "terrible tragedy" and spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as Poroshenko. Britain asked for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Ukraine.

Later, Putin said Ukraine bore responsibility for the crash, but he didn't address the question of who might have shot it down and didn't accuse Ukraine of doing so. -Louis Bacani of philstar.com; Xinhua; John-Thir Dahlburg and Peter Leonard of the Associated Press