KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s transport minister said Sunday that the government is open to new proposals from US technology firm Ocean Infinity or any other companies to resume the hunt for Flight 370, as families of passengers marked the fifth anniversary of the jet’s mysterious disappearance.
Ocean Infinity mounted a “no cure, no fee” search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2018 that ended in May without any clue on where it could have crashed. But the company’s CEO, Oliver Plunkett, said in a video shown at the public remembrance event at a mall near Kuala Lumpur that the company hopes to resume the hunt with better technology it obtained in the past year.
The Ocean Infinity mission came a year after an official search by Malaysia, Australia and China ended in futility.
Plunkett said his company has better technology now after successfully locating an Argentinian submarine in November, a year after it went missing. He said the firm is still reviewing all possible data on Flight 370 and thinking about how it can revive its failed mission.
“We haven’t given up hope ... We hope we can continue the search in due course,” Plunkett said.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke said it’s been frustrating that the two searches failed to produce any clues and that he “welcomes credible leads and also concrete proposals to resume the search.”
He told reporters later Sunday that the government is “waiting for specific proposals, in particular from Ocean Infinity.” He brushed off suggestions of offering rewards to find the plane, but said the government is willing to discuss proposals from any companies prepared to resume the search.
“There must be a proposal from a specific company ... we cannot just be out there without credible leads. That’s the most practical thing to do,” Loke said.
The plane vanished with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Confirmed debris that washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean helped narrow the search area where Ocean Infinity focused, but it failed to uncover any evidence.
A Malaysian-led independent investigation report released last July showed lapses in the government’s response and raised the possibility of “intervention by a third party.”
Investigators, however, said the cause of the disappearance cannot be determined until the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes are found. The report reiterated Malaysia’s assertion that the plane was deliberately diverted and flown for over seven hours after severing communications.
But it said there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress in the two pilots that could lead them to hijack the plane. All the other passengers were also cleared by police and had no pilot training.
Voice 370, a support group for next-of-kin, expressed hope that the new government that won a general election in May last year will do more to encourage search missions and seek new clues.
The group’s spokeswoman, Grace Nathan, urged the government to set aside up to $70 million — the amount it agreed to pay Ocean Infinity had it found the plane — to encourage exploration companies to take on “no cure, no fee” missions so that Flight 370’s passengers will not have died in vain.
“It is a wound that cannot heal” if there is no closure, Nathan said.
Another family member, K.S. Narendran from India, said the burden is on the government to be proactive and not wait for credible evidence to fall on its lap. He said there has been no government effort to find more debris on African beaches and Indian Ocean islands, where scattered pieces of the Boeing 777 have been found.
During the remembrance event, family members lit candles and sang songs in tribute to their loved ones. Relatives and supporters wore light blue T-shirts that read, “It’s not history, it’s the future. Fly safely,” as they reminded the government that the mystery must be solved to ensure aviation safety.
Malaysia to resume MH370 hunt five years on
Malaysia to resume MH370 hunt five years on
- Ocean Infinity mounted a “no cure, no fee” search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2018
- But search ended in May without any clue on where it could have crashed
Kyiv mayor calls for temporary evacuation over heating outages
- “Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Zelensky said
- He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy
KYIV: Mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes on Kyiv are set to last into the weekend, as the capital’s mayor called on residents to temporarily leave the city with sub-zero temperatures expected to fall even lower.
A massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed four and ripped open apartment blocks. Moscow also fired its feared Oreshnik ballistic missile at western Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Europe.
The barrage came hours after Moscow rejected a plan by Kyiv and its Western allies to deploy peacekeeping forces to Ukraine should a ceasefire be reached.
AFP journalists in Kyiv saw residents running for shelter late Thursday night as the air raid siren echoed, and heard Russian drones exploding into residential buildings and missiles whistling over the capital.
“Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a meeting in Kyiv with British Defense Secretary John Healy.
He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital for months.
Qatar expressed “deep regret” over the embassy hit and said that none of its staff there had been harmed.
- ‘Very difficult’ situation -
The Russian barrage left around half of all apartment blocks in the capital, some 6,000 buildings, without heating, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
Temperatures are set to fall to -15C on Saturday.
Officials said they were hopeful some heating could be restored on Friday night.
“In some areas where the damage is more complex, additional time is needed,” Ukraine’s Restoration Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Klitschko said the situation was “very difficult” and called on “residents of the capital who have the opportunity to temporarily leave the city for places with alternative sources of power and heat to do so.”
City authorities said they had set up 1,200 warming centers.
- Russia fires rarely-used missile -
A medic who died at a building that was struck in a repeat attack was among the four killed, officials said. Another 26 were wounded.
Nina, 70, who lives in one of the buildings hit, told AFP she was angry that the world was talking about a possible deal to end the conflict at a time when Russia was launching such deadly barrages.
“Where is Europe, where is America? It doesn’t hurt them the same way,” she said.
Her neighbor, 58-year-old Kostiantyn Kondratchenko fought the second-floor blaze from a drone hit with a hose used to water flowers, he told AFP.
The barrage is just the latest to batter Ukraine as diplomats wrangle for a breakthrough in what has been Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
Russia has shown no sign of slowing down its ground offensive or aerial bombardments.
Moscow’s defense ministry said it had fired the Oreshnik ballistic missile on “strategic targets” — only the second time the new weapon, which the Kremlin says is impossible to stop, is known to have been used.
- ‘Escalatory and unacceptable’ -
Ukrainian authorities said a ballistic missile traveling “at about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) per hour” had struck an “infrastructure facility” near the western city of Lviv.
It said Russia had attacked “civilian infrastructure,” without specifying the target or extent of any damage.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads.
Lviv region officials said that radiation levels were within normal range after the attack.
France, Germany and Britain condemned Moscow’s “escalatory and unacceptable” use of Oreshnik, a UK government spokeswoman said after a call between leaders of the three countries.
Across the border in Russia’s Belgorod, the governor said more than half a million people were without power or heating after a Ukrainian attack targeted the region’s utilities.
Despite intense diplomatic efforts led by US President Donald Trump, a deal to end the fighting remains elusive.
Moscow baulked this week after European leaders and US envoys announced post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a multinational force.
Russia called the plan “dangerous” and “destructive.”
Key territorial issues are also unresolved as Russia insists on getting full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, part of which is still controlled by Kyiv.
Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine.
Tens of thousands have been killed since it invaded in February 2022, millions forced to flee their homes and much of eastern and southern Ukraine decimated.
