Question: How many people died in the downing of the flight investigated by Eliot Higgins, the British citizen journalist and blogger?
Context: Usamah Mohamad (born c. 1980) is a Sudanese web developer, blogger, and citizen journalist from Omdurman arrested during the protests of June 2012.  A graduate of the University of Khartoum, he writes on Twitter under the name "simsimt". Atiaf Zaid Al-Wazir is a researcher, human rights activist, citizen journalist and blogger and co-founder of the media advocacy group Support Yemen.  Now Al-Wazir resides in Tunis, Tunisia. Alex Matthews is a white South African citizen journalist and political blogger.  He is a contributor for Thought Leader, a news website that is owned by the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian. Eliot Higgins (born 1979), who previously used the pseudonym Brown Moses, is a British citizen journalist and blogger, known for using open sources and social media to investigate the Syrian Civil War, 2014–15 Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.  He first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict. I (a child) was a case heard by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on the 10 and 11 June 2009 and decided upon on 1 December 2009.  The case principally involves the mother (a British Citizen of Indian origin), the father (a British Citizen of Pakistani origin) and their son (a British Citizen also born in the United Kingdom).  The child was born on the 27 July 2000 and was 9 years old at the time of the case. Citizen Kate is a continuing web series and video blog about Citizen journalism.  In 2008, when the series was first created by Carey Lundin of Viva Lundin Productions, "Kate Soglin, a young "citizen journalist," gave the outsider’s view of inside politics.  Citizen Kate was one of the first Citizen Journalists to hit the 2008 presidential campaign trail.  She started her video blog coverage on February 10, 2007 at Barack Obama's announcement to run for president in Springfield, Illinois.  She has filed several vblogs about the presidential campaign and politics on her web site CitizenKate.tv. Ruqia Hassan, also known as Ruqia Hassan Mohammed and by her pen name Nissan Ibrahim, (ca. 1985 – ca.  September 2015), was a Syrian independent journalist and blogger based in Raqqa, Syria.  She was a member of the activist group known as Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered, and wrote frequently under the pen name Nissan Ibrahim.  She is thought to be the first identified female citizen journalist executed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Bellingcat (also spelled "bell¿ngcat") is an investigative search network founded by the British network activist Eliot Higgins.  It uses open source and social media investigation to investigate a variety of subjects ranging from Mexican drug lords to conflicts fought around the world.  Bellingcat brings together contributors who specialise in open source and social media investigation, and it creates guides and case studies so others can learn to do the same.  Bellingcat began as an investigation of the use of weapons in the Syrian civil war.  It first received international attention with its analysis of forged data on satellite images of the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 during the still ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.  Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost about 50 km from the Ukraine–Russia border and wreckage of the aircraft landed near Torez in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km from the border.  The crash occurred in an area controlled by the Donbass People's Militia during the Battle in Shakhtarsk Raion, part of the ongoing war in Donbass.  The crash is the deadliest airliner shootdown, eighth-deadliest aviation disaster, and was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014 after the disappearance of Flight 370 on March 8. David Miller, better known by his pseudonym David Shankbone, is a photographer, blogger and Wall Street paralegal.  He has been described by PBS as "arguably the most influential new media photojournalist in the world" for his numerous copyleft photographs uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and seen in Wikipedia, documenting celebrities, political officials and events, notably the Occupy Wall Street protests.  As a Wikinews citizen journalist, he was the first to interview a sitting head of state, Israeli President Shimon Peres.  His photography has seen much usage outside of Wikipedia, having been used by magazines and news websites such as the "New York Times", the "Miami Herald" and "Business Insider", and featured in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.
Answer: 283 passengers and 15 crew