Helios has also denied delaying the release of the passengerlist although a company representative acknowledged that a list released on Monday had been "not definitive".
Michel Bezuijen, mayor of the Haarlemmermeer municipality under which Schiphol airport falls, said the passengerlist was being studied to establish the nationalities and identities of those on board.
Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passengerlist boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation.