Moves to issue death certificate to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 relatives cause anger

Africanspotlight – Relatives of flight MH370 passengers have denounced the Malaysian government’s suggestion that it would soon look into issuing death certificates for those on board despite no proof yet of what happened to the plane.

The statement, issued in response to a weekend briefing that Malaysian officials gave to families in Kuala Lumpur, also called for a review of satellite data that Malaysia says indicates the plane probably crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

“We, the families of MH370, believe that until they have conclusive proof that the plane crashed with no survivors, they have no right to attempt to settle this case with the issuance of death certificates and final payoffs,” said the statement by the “United Families of MH370″.

In Sunday’s briefing, a Malaysian official said the government would look into a timetable for issuing death certificates for passengers on the Malaysia Airlines flight. The documents are required for families to seek insurance payments, settle debts and address a range of other issues.

Deputy Foreign Minister Hamzah Zainudin also asked relatives in the meeting to submit a proposal for government financial assistance for families.

But relatives, who have repeatedly accused the government and national airline of botching a response to the plane’s disappearance and withholding information, said Malaysian authorities were playing an agonising “cat and mouse game” over the fate of their loved ones.

“WE ARE IN UTTER OUTRAGE, DESPAIR AND SHOCK!” the statement said, using bold capital letters.

The Boeing 777 went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

Australia is leading the hunt for MH370, which is believed to have crashed into the Indian Ocean after veering sharply from its route for no apparent reason. No debris has yet been found from the plane.

The aerial search for wreckage of the airliner was suspended yesterday due to a tropical cyclone, but 10 ships will continue their work.

Demanding hard evidence, some vocal relatives have repeatedly said they were not convinced by Malaysia’s conclusions about data analysis conducted by British satellite communications firm Inmarsat.

“They have failed to share why they would accept a single source [Inmarsat] for analysis, utilising a never before attempted method, as their sole grounds for determining that the plane is under the water and all lives lost,” the families said. The statement said they wanted an independent peer review, but this was rejected on grounds Inmarsat’s data was protected for privacy reasons.

In Sunday’s meeting “not a single one of our questions was answered”, it added.

Moves to issue death certificate to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 relatives cause anger

Search continues for missing Malaysian plane

A robotic submarine has continued its search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight on the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean.

Malaysia flight search

The mini-sub was deployed late on Tuesday, but was forced to resurface due to a technical issue, officials said. It has since been redeployed.

The data downloaded from the mini-sub on Wednesday had “no significant detections,” Australian officials added.

The BBC reports that Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board.

Air traffic controllers lost contact with it over the South China Sea while it was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Based on satellite data, officials believe it ended its flight thousands of kilometres off course, in seas west of the Australian city of Perth.

However, so far not a single piece of debris from the jet has been found.

On Monday, the United States Navy’s Bluefin-21 robotic submarine was sent on its first mission to search the sea floor for wreckage after signals believed to be consistent with “black box” flight recorders were detected.

Search continues for missing Malaysian plane

Jet’s disappearance ‘deliberate’, Malaysia says

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – A missing Malaysian airliner was apparently deliberately diverted and flown for hours after vanishing from radar, Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday, stopping short of confirming a hijack but taking the “excruciating” jet drama into uncharted new territory.

Najib said investigators believed “with a high degree of certainty” that Malaysia Airlines flight 370′s communications systems including its transponders were manually switched off.

He said the plane also veered westward in a fashion “consistent with deliberate action” after dropping off primary radar.

But a grave-looking Najib told a highly anticipated press conference watched around the globe that he could not confirm rising suspicions that the plane had been forcibly taken over.

“Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear: we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate from its original flight path,” he said.

“We realise this is an excruciating time for the families of those on board,” Najib said. He did not take questions.

The investigation data appeared to cast aside a host of theories attempting to explain the plane’s disappearance, which has transfixed the world and left the families of the 239 passengers and crew distraught, enraged and baying for information that authorities have not been able to provide.

-’Excruciating time’-

Previous theories swirling around MH370 included a sudden mid-air explosion, catastrophic equipment or structural failure, or a crash into the South China Sea.

At the same time, the announcement opened a whole new avenue of speculation including an attempted 9/11-style attack, enhancing the intrigue surrounding one of the biggest enigmas in modern aviation history.

The 9/11 hijackers turned off the transponders of three of the four planes that were commandeered. Transponders transmit data on a plane’s location to air traffic controllers.

Final satellite communication with the Boeing 777, scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, came more than six-and-a-half hours after it vanished from civilian radar at 1:30am on March 8, Najib said.

That is around the time Malaysia Airlines has said the plane would have run out of fuel.

Najib said investigators had concluded the plane was indeed diverted to the west from its original flight path, and as a result search operations in the South China Sea were being called off.

But the new search zone is impossibly large — Najib said the plane could be anywhere from Kazakhstan to the southern Indian Ocean.

Earlier, a senior Malaysian military official had told AFP that investigators believe the plane was commandeered by a “skilled, competent and current pilot” who knew how to avoid radar.

The official stopped short of specifying whether a hijacker or member of the crew was suspected.

-’Something beyond 9/11′-

As the search for the plane continues, investigators will focus on who would have diverted it and why.

Malaysian security officials were already embarrassed by revelations that two Iranian men had managed to board the plane using stolen European passports.

It could also bring new attention on Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.

Malaysian reporters told AFP they witnessed police enter Zaharie’s house on Saturday. They said police spent two hours there. Police declined comment to AFP.

An Australian television station had days earlier broadcast an interview with a young South African woman who alleged Fariq and another pilot colleague invited them into the cockpit of a flight he co-piloted in 2011 — a breach of post-9/11 security rules.

Gerry Soejatman, a Jakarta-based independent aviation analyst, told AFP the new information makes a motive in a possible terror conspiracy “extremely difficult to understand.”

“If that was deliberate, we may be dealing with something beyond the mission planning for 9/11,” he said.

Dozens of ships and aircraft from 14 countries have been deployed across the entire search zone since MH370 went missing.

-’A conspiracy from the beginning’-

The Malaysian leader’s remarks did little to ease the nerves of anguished relatives gathered at a hotel in Beijing. Most passengers were Chinese.

“I feel (Malaysia Airlines) has been playing a role in the incident,” said Wen Wancheng, whose son was aboard.

“I feel the incident has been a conspiracy and a deal from the beginning,” he said, adding he still maintains hope his son is alive.

Malaysia Airlines defended its handling of the crisis, saying it has “shared all available information with the relevent authorities”.

“This is truly an unprecedented situation, for Malaysia Airlines and for the entire aviation industry,” it said in a statement.

Even with attention now firmly on the Indian Ocean, the search parameters pose enormous logistical challenges in locating the plane or its black box.

“Wind and sea conditions are definitely going to play a very big part if there is wreckage and if it happens to be in the Indian Ocean. It is an immense area,” said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor for aviation industry magazine FlightGlobal.

The plane has one of the best safety records of any jet, and the airline also has a solid record.

Malaysia has not been the target of any notable terror attacks, but terror analysts say it is home to several individuals alleged to be operatives of militant Islamic groups such as the Al-Qaeda linked Jemaah Islamiyah.

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Jet’s disappearance ‘deliberate’, Malaysia says

Officials deny report that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 kept flying for hours

(CNN) – Yet another conflicting storyline emerged overnight in the perplexing disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 nearly six days ago.

After search crews failed to find any trace of debris suggested by Chinese satellite photographs, Malaysian officials on Thursday denied a newspaper report that suggested the plane may have kept flying for four hours after its last reported contact.

The officials acknowledged the search for the jetliner, which disappeared early Saturday, is becoming harder and harder.

The report from The Wall Street Journal said U.S. aviation investigators and national security officials were basing their belief that the missing plane kept flying on data automatically transmitted to the ground from the passenger jet’s engines.

But Malaysia’s acting Transportation Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference that the report, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter, was “inaccurate.”

The news came after Vietnamese and Chinese search crews found nothing where Chinese satellite photographs released Wednesday showed large floating objects in the South China Sea.

The spot is between Malaysia and Vietnam and not far from the plane’s expected flight path.

China’s State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense described the images as showing “a suspected crash site.”

But Chinese authorities later said the release of the satellite images was a mistake and that they didn’t show any debris relating to the plane, Hishammuddin said.

Engine data controversy

The Malaysian denial of the Wall Street Journal piece is the latest in a series of conflicting accounts involving crucial details such as the plane’s route, when it vanished and other issues.

The Wall Street Journal report said the plane’s engines have an onboard monitoring system supplied by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC. The system “periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground,” the newspaper said.

Malaysia Airlines sends its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis, the report said, and that data is now being analyzed to figure out the flight path of the missing plane after contact was lost with its transponder, a radio transmitter in the cockpit that communicates with ground radar.

But Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said Thursday that Rolls-Royce and Boeing have reported that they didn’t receive transmissions of any kind after 1:07 a.m. Saturday. Air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane shortly afterward, around 1:30 a.m.

Erin Atan, a spokeswoman for Rolls-Royce in Asia, declined to comment on the matter, telling CNN it was “an official air accident investigation.”

Malaysian officials said they had consulted with the makers of the plane and its engines, who told them that no transmissions of any kind were received from the plane after air traffic controllers lost contact with it.

The report threatened to open the door to a fresh round of theories about what has become of the plane, which vanished while flying over Southeast Asia on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Four more hours in the air could have put the plane many hundreds of miles beyond the area currently being searched.

But one aviation industry observer expressed skepticism about the report even before the denials by officials.

“I find this very, very difficult to believe,” Tom Ballantyne, chief correspondent for the magazine Orient Aviation, told CNN. “That this aircraft could have flown on for four hours after it disappeared and not have been picked up by someone’s radar and not have been seen by anyone, it’s almost unbelievable.”

Search getting harder

The mystery over the fate of the passenger jet, a Boeing 777-200, and the 239 people it was carrying has so far left government officials and aviation experts flummoxed.

“With every passing day the task becomes more difficult,” Hishammuddin said Thursday.

Searchers have already been combing a vast area of sea and land for traces of the plane. But so far, with the search well into its sixth day, their efforts have been fruitless.

Malaysian officials say they are still trying to determine if a radar blip detected heading west soon after the plane lost contact was in fact the missing jet.

If it was, the plane would have been hundreds of miles off its original flight path and headed in the wrong direction. Malaysian officials say they have asked U.S. experts to help them analyze the radar data.

Meanwhile, India is joining the multinational search, dispatching two of its naval ships off the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, a military spokesman told CNN on Thursday.

Last known words

Also on Thursday, a Malaysian aviation official told CNN that the last known words from the flight crew of the missing plane were “All right, good night.”

Malaysian civil aviation officer Zulazri Mohd Ahnuar said he couldn’t confirm which member of the flight crew sent the message, which was transmitted from the plane back to Malaysian flight controllers as the aircraft transferred into Vietnamese airspace early Saturday.

For the families of those on board the missing plane, the wait for news is tortuous.

Danica Weeks is trying to keep it together for her two young sons, though the possibility of life without husband Paul, who was on the plane, is sometimes overwhelming. She’s clinging to hope even though, as Weeks told CNN’s Piers Morgan, it’s “not looking good.”

“Every day, it just seems like it’s an eternity, it’s an absolute eternity,” Weeks said from Australia. “We can only go minute by minute … and hope something comes soon.”

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Officials deny report that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 kept flying for hours