If it disappears, this is what it looks like: Did joke turn tragically true for Dutch passenger on MH17 flight?

A Dutch national who was reportedly among the 295 passengers on board flight MH17, took a picture of the aircraft hours before it crashed after being shot down over eastern Ukraine. 

Cor Pan, a self-employed resident of Volendam, Netherlands, took a picture of the plane from the departure lounge in the Amsterdam airport and posted it on Facebook with the caption "If it disappears, this is what it looks like." The post went viral with the world media picking it up and has been shared over 16,000 times.

Cor Pan and his girl friend Neeltje Tol may have been on the plane and their friends, who'd first taken this post as a joke, are now in despair. A friend even posted a picture paying her condolences.

But the photo may not have been of the plane that crashed.

The plane in the Facebook photo has a registration number 9M-MRC - as indicated by the "RC" under the nose wheel. The downed plane was 9M-MRD.

Another clue that the photo is of the wrong plane is that the photo was posted a full hour and a half before MH17 took off, according to Flightradar24.

For comprehensive coverage on the Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash, read here.