[www.inewsguyana.com] – Malaysia’s civil aviation chief has said the fate of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet remains “a mystery”.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said officials had not ruled out hijacking as a cause of the plane’s disappearance.
The possible sighting of a yellow life raft was investigated on Monday, but was found to be an unrelated object.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar almost three days ago en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, with 239 people on board.
Relatives of the missing passengers have been told to prepare for the worst. Malaysia’s armed forces chief also said they were co-operating with Chinese intelligence to identify the two passengers on board flight MH370 who were travelling on stolen passports.
Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, said all of the relevant information concerning those two passengers had now been passed on to the various national intelligence agencies which were investigating the matter.
Earlier, China said the Malaysian authorities needed to “step up their efforts” to find the missing jet which had more than 150 Chinese nationals on board.
“The Malaysian side attaches importance to the incident with a sincere attitude, but in light of the situation, the Malaysian side needs to step up their efforts,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman told reporters at a regular news briefing, the AFP news agency reports.
Commander William Marks from the US Seventh Fleet, which is taking part in the search, says he expects the plane’s flight recorders to be floating in the water.
“In calm seas, if there were a soccer ball [football] or a basketball floating in the water, the radar could pick it up. They [flight recorders] typically have a radio beacon and so for example our P3 [radar] – if they are flying within a certain range of that – will pick up that radio beacon. We have not yet picked up anything, but that’s typically what those black boxes contain.”
There are now 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations taking part in the search in the seas off Vietnam and Malaysia.Late on Sunday, the Vietnamese authorities said two objects had been sighted in waters south of Vietnam which appeared to resemble aircraft parts, including a door.
The debris was in a similar area to a possible oil slick seen by Vietnamese navy planes on Saturday.
But Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said on Monday that this sighting had never been officially verified and could not be confirmed.
Samples of the oil had been collected and sent to a laboratory for analysis to see if it came from the plane, he said.
US Navy officials earlier said their aircraft had not seen any debris associated with commercial aircraft wreckage.
Passport theory
Flight MH370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 00:41 local time on Saturday (16:41 GMT on Friday). But radio contact was lost at 17:30 GMT, somewhere between Malaysia and Vietnam.
Officials say they still have no idea what went wrong.
Malaysian military officials said on Sunday they were widening the search area because of indications the plane, a Boeing 777-200ER, may have turned back from its scheduled route shortly before vanishing from radar screens.
Commander William Marks from the US Seventh Fleet, which is taking part in the search, told the BBC the search area covered hundreds of kilometres.
“Just from the air we can see things as small as almost the size of your hand, or a basketball. So it’s not a matter of if we can see it – it’s an extremely large area.”
Investigators are looking at all angles, including a possible terror attack. Counter-terrorism agencies and the FBI are involved in the operation.
The focus has been on two passengers who boarded the flight using stolen passports.
International police agency Interpol has confirmed the passengers were travelling with Italian and Austrian passports stolen in Thailand years ago. [BBC]
