Royal Australian Air Force co-pilot Marc Smith searching for the plane.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared more than two weeks ago en route to Beijing, crashed thousands of kilometres away in the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said yesterday, citing new satellite data.

All 239 people on board were presumed dead, airline officials said.

Analysis of satellite information from British company Inmarsat had shown that the Boeing 777’s last position was in the Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia, Najib said in a statement.

“This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” he said. “It is therefore, with deep sadness and regret, that I must inform you that, according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.”

He added that the families of the passengers and crew had been informed.

“For them, the past few weeks have been heart-breaking. I know this news must be harder still.”

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak (second from left) announcing that no passengers of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are assumed alive, at Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur, yesterday.

Malaysia Airlines denied reports that it had communicated the news to relatives in an English language text message.

A spokesman said in a statement: “Malaysia Airlines did not only send an SMS. The message was conveyed to all families face to face by our top management at the hotels.

“SMS and phone calls were made to those who are not in the hotels via our family support centre. We wanted to ensure that families are informed via all channels.”

There were hysterical scenes at the Beijing hotel where many of the relatives of those on board are staying. More than 150 of the passengers were Chinese.

People wailed, cried and dropped to the floor. One woman shouted out: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible.” A Reuters reporter saw at least four people being carried away on stretchers.

China’s government immediately demanded that Malaysia share all information and evidence which showed the plane went down in the Indian Ocean.

No clue on what really happened

Selamat Omar, father of flight engineer Mohd Khairul Amri Selam who was on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, passes on the sad news after being told that the plane ended its journey in the southern Indian Ocean.

Najib’s comments came as an Australian navy ship was close to finding possible debris from the jetliner after a mounting number of sightings of floating objects that are believed to parts of the plane.

The search site is about 2,500km southwest of Perth, in icy sub-Arctic seas that are in one of the most remote parts of the globe.

The objects, described as a “grey or green circular object” and an “orange rectangular object”, were spotted yesterday afternoon, said Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8. No confirmed sighting of the plane has been made since and there is no clue what went wrong.

Attention and resources in the search for the plane have shifted from an initial focus north of the Equator to an increasingly narrowed stretch of rough sea in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometres from the original flight path.

Earlier yesterday, Xinhua news agency said a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft spotted two “relatively big” floating objects and several smaller white ones dispersed over several kilometres.

In a further sign the search was bearing fruit, the US Navy was flying in its high-tech black box detector to the area.

At crash sites, finding the black boxes soon is crucial because the locator beacons they carry fade out after 30 days.

Investigators believe someone on the flight shut off the plane’s communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

That has led them to focus on hijacking or sabotage, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. Faint electronic ‘pings’ also detected by Inmarsat suggested it flew for another six hours or so, but the initial analysis could do no better than place its final signal on one of two vast arcs, the north and south corridors. Najib said Inmarsat had been performing further calculations on the data.

The plane’s last position was in the middle of Indian Ocean

“Using a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort, they have been able to shed more light on MH370’s flight path,” he said.

“Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth.”

Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president for external affairs, said: “They tested (the earlier findings) against a number of known flights of other aircraft and came to the conclusion that only the southern route was possible.”

The new method “gives the approximate direction of travel, plus or minus about 100 miles, to a track line,” he told Britain’s Sky News.

“Unfortunately, this is a 1990s satellite over the Indian Ocean that is not GPS-equipped. All we believe we can do is to say that we believe it is in this general location, but we cannot give you the final few feet and inches where it landed. It’s not that sort of system.”