A Dutch firm will conduct a deep-water search in the Indian Ocean for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from September, Australia said on Wednesday, expressing "cautious optimism" that the plane will be found.

Fugro Survey will use its state-of-the-art vessel MV Fugro Equator and the Fugro Discovery to search a 60,000 square-kilometer (23,000 square-mile) zone in the southern Indian Ocean.

A plane carrying remains of victims from downed flight MH17 arrived in the Netherlands on Monday as Malaysian experts joined the international probe at the crash site in eastern Ukraine.

The Dutch military transport plane carried a single coffin filled with human remains which Ukraine said had been found in the search operation, as well as DNA and belongings that had been kept in the rebel-held city of Donetsk for some time.

Olga, a blonde woman in a black-and-white patterned summer dress, stares ahead tearfully as she says: "My son is lost."

With several dozen others, she stands on a patch of grass in front of a wall of sandbags guarding the occupied security service headquarters in the east Ukraine's rebel stronghold of Donetsk. 

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak appealed Thursday for an "immediate cessation" of fighting between Ukraine government forces and rebels around the crash site of flight MH17 near the Russian border.

Downed flight MH17 has claimed another victim in a 93-year-old man who succumbed to the "indescribable grief" of losing his daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren in the crash, family have said.

Hendrik (Henk) Palm, from the northern Dutch town of Roden, died "after the indescribable grief of losing his daughter, Erla (Palm), son-in-law Rob (van der Linde) and grandchildren Merel and Mark" in the Malaysia Airlines crash, family members said in a death notice carried by De Stentor regional newspaper.

Any airline would struggle with the devastating impact of losing one jet full of passengers, especially if it had already been bleeding money for years.

But losing another just months later is pushing crisis-hit Malaysia Airlines to the brink of financial collapse, airline experts said, spotlighting whether it can steer its way out of extended turmoil as once-troubled carriers such as Korean Air and Garuda Indonesia did before.

At least three people died after an overloaded boat ferrying Indonesians home for the coming Eid al-Fitr festival sank off southern Malaysia, a maritime official said Friday.

Three bodies were recovered, ten people were rescued and eight more remained missing in the incident early Thursday, the latest in a string of tragic boat accidents to mar the run-up to the Islamic holiday.

The first bodies from flight MH17 arrived in the Netherlands on Wednesday almost a week after it was shot down over Ukraine, with grieving relatives and the king and queen solemnly receiving the as yet unidentified victims.

Church bells rang out throughout the country as the planes touched down with the much-delayed return of the first 40 bodies of the 298 people killed in the disaster, most of them Dutch.

Malaysia's bitterly divided political forces put aside their differences on Wednesday to denounce the attack on flight MH17 as a heinous international crime and call jointly for swift justice for those responsible.

Prime Minister Najib Razak led the charge, condemning the Malaysia Airlines flight's shooting down by a surface-to-air missile.

Malaysian flight MH17 may have been shot down by "mistake" by ill-trained pro-Russian separatists, U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday, while dismissing Moscow's accounts of the incident as propaganda.