KUALA LUMPUR: Family and friends of Malaysia Airline flight MH370 victims have been left without “closure” following the Malaysian government’s decision to end the four-year search for the missing jetliner.
Georgina Tan, a former colleague and friend of many of the cabin crew on the MH370, told Arab News that she had been deeply depressed for almost two months after the flight’s disappearance in March 2014 and was still affected by the incident.
“Looking back, looking at the time the plane was off the radar, strikes a chord with the rest of us crew members. You can even imagine what they were doing at the time. It’s scary. I used to be on that particular flight every other week,” she said.
Tan was a Malaysian Airlines cabin crew member for 20 years and was in the same fleet as the MH370 crew.
“From the first week when the plane disappeared, I had nightmares,” she said.
“I still have hopes that we will find them and what had happened to them.”
Tan refuses to condemn the MH370 pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the subject of criticism by several international media outlets.
“I knew Capt. Zaharie as a responsible and liberal man. It’s not like him to bring people to death based on his private grievances,” she said.
Tan, like most families and friends of the MH370 victims, is unhappy over the Malaysian government’s decision to halt the search for the ill-fated aircraft.
Malaysia has conducted joint search operations with several other countries for the past four years at a cost of more than $200 million, but has found no sign of the missing flight.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a press conference on Wednesday: “We have to come to a stage where we cannot keep on searching for something that we really cannot find.”
The government would consider resuming the search if new evidence surfaces. It would also release a full and final report of the search in July, he said.
Tan said she agreed that the search “is going nowhere, so they needed to stop spending unnecessary money.”
She welcomes the government’s promise to release a report because many families were “drawn away from the real facts of the case.”
However, Tan wants the government to reopen the case, with more detailed investigation.
“There were many leads. All we need are good investigators to handle the case,” she said.
The Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared 38 minutes after taking off on March 8, 2014.
The flight, carrying 239 passengers and crew, vanished from the radar and was never seen again.
