Malaysia don’t care about us at all.
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“Our demand is to go to Reunion island and look for ourselves”, said Hu Xiufang, who had three relatives, including her son, on board the plane. French investigators haven’t yet confirmed that it is from the plane.
Sara Weeks, the sister of MH370 passenger Paul Weeks of New Zealand, said the confirmation ended “a week of turmoil”.
The country has largely funded the search effort and is opposed to expanding expensive underwater searches without strong evidence.
The wing piece, known as a flaperon, was found on one of La Reunion’s beaches last week.
“I don’t care if they found the wreckage, and I don’t care where the plane is”, Li Huiyun, who lost her husband in the plane’s disappearance, told Time magazine.
“We hope very much that the debris that was discovered on Reunion Island, if it is found to be conclusively part of the aircraft, that this will help to bring some sense of closure about what happened”, he said in Kuala Lumpur.
He added that the paint colour on the flaperon also matches the airline’s records.
Brian Alexander, a lawyer with US firm Kreindler & Kreindler LLC, which represents 48 families of MH370 passengers from around the world, said the flaperon alone would be unlikely to present enough evidence to inform a legal case. “The expert team strongly feel and confirm that it is MH370”.
“One piece is unlikely to be too important as to causation”, Alexander said.
“These are all the experts from the technical side, from Malaysian team, and they train in these areas, so they will be able to identify whether it is aircraft material or whether it is cushion aircraft material”, he said in an interview.
“We expect and hope that there would be more objects to be found which would be able to help resolve this mystery”, it said in a statement.
As the amount of debris on the island continues to pile up, relatives of the 239 passengers and crew members have expressed concern and a desire to go to the island, and have become agitated that they have not been taken there yet.
China’s Foreign Ministry has reacted to Malaysia’s confirmation by saying that the result points to a conclusion that the flight crashed. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian defended the government’s relative silence saying instead, “We have above all mobilized our means” since the plane disappeared.
“We are all in the same direction”, he told CNN.
American and Australian officials echoed the French, leaving the Malaysians on their own, though no less convinced that they are in the right.
After several hours on Thursday morning, the group was invited into a closed-door talk with airline officials.
“As soon as new or changed information comes to light, we make it available”, Dolan told The Associated Press on Friday. “The French inquiry, of course, has not been quite so conclusive”. But the dissonant comments prompted frustration from families of those on board the plane, who have waited more than 500 days for solid clues into the fate of their loved ones.
The Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8 last year, sparking the largest search operation in history, now focused on the southern Indian Ocean based on satellite data hinting at the plane’s path.
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Malaysian officials say it came from the missing Boeing 777 but investigators from other countries are being more cautious. Our target area is 120,000 square kilometres within that and we’ve searched over half of that area to date.
