Chinese relatives’ anger over sparse information on the fate of their loved ones on board a missing Malaysian airliner sparked chaotic scenes yesterday at the headquarters of an increasingly deadlocked search operation.
Malaysia’s transport minister ordered an inquiry after security guards carried out the distraught mother of a passenger on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from a briefing room where she had protested about a lack of transparency, 12 days after the plane vanished.
We don’t know how long we have to wait
“They are just saying wait for information. Wait for information. We don’t know how long we have to wait,” cried the woman before being whisked away from a massive media scrum.
Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he regretted the anguish.
“Malaysia is doing everything in its power to find MH370 and hopefully bring some degree of closure for those whose family members are missing,” he said in a statement.
Prospects that a 26-nation operation would lead to quick results appeared to be dwindling, however, as investigators confirmed they were focusing on the remote southern Indian Ocean after failing to find any traces of the jet further north.
“Our top priority is being given to that area,” Hishammuddin told the news conference, confirming an earlier Reuters report.
No wreckage has been found from Flight MH370, which vanished from air traffic control screens off Malaysia’s east coast at 1.21am local time on March 8 (1721 GMT March 7), less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.
An unprecedented search for the Boeing 777-200ER is under way in two vast search “corridors one arcing north overland from Laos towards the Caspian Sea, the other curving south across the Indian Ocean from west of Indonesia’s Sumatra island to west of Australia.
“The working assumption is that it went south, and furthermore that it went to the southern end of that corridor,” said a source close to the investigation.
The view is based on the lack of any evidence from countries along the northern corridor that the plane entered their airspace, and the failure to find any trace of wreckage in searches in the upper part of the southern corridor.
Some sources involved in the investigation have voiced fears it could be drifting towards deadlock due to the reluctance of countries in the region to share militarily sensitive radar data that might shed new light on the direction the jet took.
People familiar with the probe said the search had been hampered in some cases by delays over the paperwork needed to allow foreign maritime surveillance aircraft into territorial waters without a for-mal diplomatic request.