What seems to be the problem with those policies? According to insurance companies’ rules, there are a few circumstances in which policy owners or their families cannot claim the insurance money – suicide or murder while conducting a criminal act. Another exception is war. Now this last detail is not clearly defined by those rules. In general, there has to be a war declared and policy owners must be either in military service or in some way entangled in military operations to be excluded from the payment. If a policy owner dies as a civilian casualty in sort of “collateral damage” way, he’s excluded as well, but he has to be present in the war zone.
In this case, most of the passengers were Dutch, the plane was Malaysian and neither of the countries is at war with Ukraine or Russia nor there is a war declared between the two. There is an existing war zone on the ground above which the plane was shot down, but this was an unarmed airliner traveling at height of 10000 meters which is considered to be safe. If all other information we have today are correct, the plane was deliberately shot down by either a war plane or by SAM missile, therefore, this is an act of murder not war. Moreover people on that plane were in no way participating in war activities on the ground nor can they be considered “collateral damage” in this case.
Whenever this situation resolves, we might see some additional clauses in life insurance policies similar to those that were added to property insurance policies following the 9/11 incident. Some insurance companies were on the brink of bankruptcy after paying for the damage, but have used this tragedy to advertise by adding a plane crash clause into their offers – meaning your property is insured even from a plane crash. How this case resolves and will tragic incident be used in promotional purposes remains to be seen.
