20 December 2016•Update: 20 December 2016
By P Prem Kumar
KUALA LUMPUR
Malaysia’s transport minister said Tuesday that the search mission for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has not been abandoned.
Liow Tiong Lai’s statement was issued after the release of a report saying that international investigators determined that wreckage from the flight could possibly be found north of an area where the hunt has been conducted for more than two years in the southern Indian Ocean.
“There is a high degree of confidence that the previously identified underwater area searched to date does not contain the missing aircraft,” said the report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which coordinates the search.
It added that the experts identified an area of around 25,000 square kilometers (9,653 square miles) north of the current search area as having “the highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft”.
The Malaysian minister said that every decision on MH370 “has and will always be in the spirit of cooperation among the three countries involved in the search operation -- China, Australia and Malaysia”.
"While the report presented a thorough analysis of MH370 search efforts, we remain to be guided as to how this can be used to assist us in identifying the specific location of the aircraft," Liow underlined.
He noted that the governments involved had agreed during a ministerial meeting in July that future steps would be determined depending on the emergence of “credible” new information that could be used in identifying the location of the aircraft.
He, however, did not divulge whether Tuesday’s ATSB report would be considered “credible new information."
"Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew of MH370," said Liow.
Meanwhile, Australia’s minister for infrastructure and transport said he remained hopeful that the plane would be found in the current search area.
"As agreed at the Tripartite Ministers meeting in Malaysia in July we will be suspending the search unless credible evidence is available that identifies the specific location of the aircraft,” Darren Chester was quoted as saying by news broadcaster ABC.
"The search for MH370 has been the largest in aviation history and has tested the limits of technology, and the capacity of our experts and people at sea,” he added. "Our thoughts remain with the families and loved ones of the 239 people on board."
An ATSB report released earlier this year said that authorities from Malaysia, Australia and China revealed that the hunt is now predicted to continue into 2017 as the search of 120,000 sq km of the southern Indian Ocean continues to be hampered by bad weather.
The hunt was originally intended to be completed by mid-2016, but a search of the remaining less than 10,000 sq km of the area will now be completed "around January/February 2017".
Flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The jetliner has yet to be found despite massive search operations in the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft was believed to have ended its flight after diverting from its original route.
To-date, at least six pieces of aircraft debris found along Africa’s east coast have been confirmed as “almost certainly” coming from MH370.
After 10 months of intensive undersea search for the vanished flight, on Jan. 29, 2015 Malaysia declared that MH370 was lost in an accident, killing all passengers.
On July 29 last year, a piece of aircraft debris was found washed ashore on the French island, east of Madagascar. The debris -- believed to be from a Boeing 777 -- was sent to Toulouse, France, for analysis the following day.
Days after, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the flaperon was from MH370, and that the flight indeed ended in the Indian Ocean.
