Minister meets with MH370 relatives
SYDNEY: Malaysia’s transport minister yesterday met a group representing families of passengers from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in Perth, after being lobbied by relatives of those lost when the plane vanished in 2014.
The Voice370 group said on Sunday it would deliver personal letters to Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, asking him to resume the search that was called off last week.
“I will be receiving their letter today, I’ll be meeting her and we hope that we can have a good discussion,” Mr Liow told reporters in the Western Australian state capital Perth yesterday.
The Boeing 777 jet disappeared in March 2014 en route to Beijing from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, with 239 people on board, sparking one of the world’s great aviation mysteries.
Sheryl Keen, from Aircrash Support Group Australia, which represents Australian victims, handed about 100 letters to Mr Liow at what she said was a “positive meeting”, adding that he showed interest in continuing investigations into the missing jet.
Joined in Perth by counterparts from China and Australia to welcome ashore crew members from the returned Fugro Equator search vessel, Mr Liow reiterated that the underwater search would only be restarted if “credible new evidence” as to the plane’s whereabouts was discovered.
“We will continue to work on the debris ... we are committed to continue with the search for the debris, and from today on we hope we can get more credible evidence,” said Mr Liow at a news conference on the dock where the last search vessel is now moored after ending its voyage.
Mr Liow also contradicted an earlier statement from his deputy that the Malaysian government was offering a reward to any private company that found the plane’s fuselage. Mr Liow said the comment last week by Deputy Transport Minister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi reflected his deputy’s personal opinion, and was not an official proposal by the government.
The crew of Fugro Equator was welcomed home yesterday after they were ordered to return last week when the countries officially suspended the nearly three-year search for the plane in the Indian Ocean.
The $160 million deep-sea sonar search off Australia’s west coast failed to find any trace of the plane. But Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester denied the effort had been a failure, saying crews had managed to eliminate the 120,000 sq km search zone as a possible crash site.
Several relatives of the 239 people on board the plane have fiercely criticised the decision to end the search before finding their loved ones, and called on officials to scour a new 25,000 sq km area immediately to the north of the old search zone that a group of international investigators recently identified as the likeliest resting place of the wreckage. The investigators calculated the possible new crash site by re-analysing satellite data that tracked the plane’s movements and looking at a new drift analysis of debris that has washed ashore on coastlines throughout the Indian Ocean. The experts recommended in a report released last month by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau that the new area be searched.
Yesterday, the bureau’s chief commissioner expressed confidence that the plane probably lies in that new zone. “It’s highly likely that the area now defined by the experts contains the aircraft but that’s not absolutely for certain,” Greg Hood said. But the three countries agreed the hunt would be suspended after crews finished combing
the official search zone unless credible new evidence emerged that pinpointed the specific location of the aircraft. The investigators’ recommendation, they said, wasn’t precise enough to justify a search extension.