“Ministers reiterated that the aspiration to locate MH370 has not been abandoned”, the meeting’s hosts, Liow Tiong Lai, Australia’s Darren Chester and China’s Yang Chuantang, said in the statement.
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The Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew aboard vanished in March 2014 while on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Satellite communication analysis revealed that the plane had diverted its flight path and flew into the southern part of the Indian Ocean.
Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still hopes to find the craft.
“Whether to resume the search and whether to continue, that would depend on the new credible evidence that we obtain”, he said.
Asked if the flaperon found on the shore of La Reunion Island had any indication of controlled ditching, Liow said there has not been any evidence to substantiate the claim.
He said drift patterns indicate that the debris originated in the current search area, discrediting recent reports that crews may have been looking in the wrong place.
On the Chinese social media app WeChat, people who identified themselves as family members of passengers were outraged.
“We are very pleased that the search is being suspended and not terminated”, Grace Nathan, a lawyer whose mother, Anne Daisy Nathan, was on the flight, told the Wall Street Journal.
Recovery operations in the southern Indian Ocean will be suspended after ships finish scouring the 120,000 square-kilometer (46,330 square miles) zone.
With rough winter seas delaying the last leg of the search, Mr Liow said completion was expected between October and December. “What kind of information will they need to continue the search?” However, few pieces of debris, which was confirmed to be from a Boeing 777 have washed up on beaches of Madagascar and Mozambique, thousands of miles away from the location of the search. “We will definitely gather to protest it and I have lost confidence to the Malaysian government”.
Costs for the search have climbed above $130 million, which makes it the most expensive in history.
Deciding the search area in 2014, authorities assumed the plane had no “inputs” during its final descent, meaning there was no pilot or no conscious pilot.
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But the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has previously said wreckage found on the southwestern shores of the Indian Ocean was consistent with the plane crashing in the expansive search area.
