Several dozen relatives of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 gathered at the ministry on Friday to hand over a letter of protest amid the recent announcement that the meticulous ocean search operations for the missing flight would soon be suspended.
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Relatives of some of the plane’s Chinese passengers have gathered in the capital to contest a decision to possibly suspend the search. However, Malaysia’s own transport minister confirmed two years ago that Malaysia was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze data from the simulator’s hard drives.
The large wing part was brought to Canberra for analysis after it was found by locals on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania last month.
The search has lasted more than two years but has found no sign of the main wreckage.
Australian officials have determined that four other pieces of debris found in Mozambique, South Africa and Mauritius nearly certainly came from the plane, which was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished. “Whatever findings now are not conclusive until we recover the black box which will tell us what actually happened. if not, everything else is speculative”, he said.
“We will continue to demand the meeting because we want to know the most accurate information of what was going on in that meeting” between Chinese, Australian and Malaysian officials who discussed the fate of the search, he said.
“Since these people spent the money of Chinese tax payers to represent Chinese relatives to attend the meeting, they are obliged to see us”, said Jiang Hui, whose mother was on the plane.
Earlier in the day news reports quoted Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre – which is leading the search in the Indian Ocean – as saying that “the MH370 captain’s flight simulator showed someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean”.
Investigators believe someone may have deliberately switched off the plane’s transponder before diverting it thousands of miles off course over the Indian Ocean.
His comments come a year after a large piece of wing debris was found on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and positively identified by French officials as originating from the flight, which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people onboard.
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Officials have said the search, hampered by bad weather and damaged equipment, will end by December.
