The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Families’ jet hunt anger
AUSTRALIA’S PRIME minister has said he is hopeful a clue will emerge soon to narrow the hunt for Flight MH370, as relatives of Chinese passengers on the plane protested in Malaysia to demand that the government apologise for its handling of the search.
Sofar, even though more ships are scouring the area off western Australia, none of the recovered items has been connected to the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed on March 8 with 239 people on board.
“My understanding from this morning is that there has been no discrete debris associated with the flight,” Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy told reporters .
In Sydney, Prime Minister Tony Abbott described the “intensifying search effort” as positive because objects “have been recovered from the ocean”.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) said 10 planes took part in the search yesterday, leaving in staggered times from the western city of Perth.
The ships are trying to locate and identify the objects sighted by aircraft over the past two days.
Mr Leavy, the commander of the search task force, said the operation was made more difficult because the particular area being combed is in a shipping lane and may be littered with floating objects.
In Malaysia, several dozen Chinese relatives of passengers of Flight MH370 demanded yesterday that the Malaysian government apologise for its handling of the search for the plane and for the prime minister’s statement saying it crashed into the southern Indian Ocean.
Holding up banners that read “Tell us the truth. Give us our relatives back” in English, the group staged a protest at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur just hours after flying in from Beijing.
Australian warship Ocean Shield with an aircraft black box detector was leaving yesterday to join the search and will take three to four days to reach the search zone.