Just three of the 298 people on board Malaysian Airways flight MH17, brought down by a missile over eastern Ukraine last July, remain unidentified, the Dutch justice ministry said on Tuesday.

All three who have yet to be named are Dutch, the ministry said. According to a spokesman, it is still possible they will be identified from the body parts held at the Netherlands Forensic Institute. How long this will take is unknown.

In the meantime, it has been disclosed that Ukraine informed the Netherlands about the dangerous situation in its airspace prior to the MH17 crash, but ministers did not pass the information on to airlines.

The Dutch security service regulator is investigating exactly what the security services knew about the situation in Ukraine at the time of the crash.