Cargo Manifest For Flight MH17 Reveals Pets, Diplomatic Mail on Board

Malaysia Airlines on Friday released the cargo manifest for Flight MH17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday.

Malaysia Airlines, and the various governments involved, are still piecing together evidence to determine who fired the missile and confirmed information is slowly trickling out to the public.

In addition to the 298 lives lost, pets were also among the casualties. According to the manifest, which is a list of all the cargo carried on board, there were nine crates of live birds, and two dogs. The birds were going in part to Kuala Lumpur and in part to Dhaka, Bangladesh. One of the dogs was headed to Kuala Lumpur, and the other was bound for Manila in the Philippines.

In the Boeing 777's holds, in addition to luggage, there were also flowers (the Netherlands is a major source of flowers), helicopter parts and diplomatic mail from the Malaysian Embassy in the Netherlands to the Foreign Ministry back home. Diplomatic mail is typically delivered by a diplomatic courier, but neither Malaysia Airlines nor the government has announced the presence of any diplomats among the deceased.

The manifest also lists a single "shipment of pot" -- however, while cannabis is tolerated in Amsterdam, in this case it's something else entirely. A separate sheet of the cargo manifest specifies that this refers to a "potentiostat galvanostat," a device used to in electroanalytical experiments, destined for a university laboratory in India.