SYDNEY:
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott voiced increasing hope today of
discovering the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and the 239
people on board after unidentified debris was sighted in the search
zone.
The comments came hours after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) announced that “further attempts will be made to establish whether the objects sighted are related to MH370,” today.
“It’s still too early to be
definite, but obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads
and there is increasing hope — no more than hope, no more than hope —
that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this
ill-fated aircraft,” Abbott said.
The prime minister spoke
after several unidentified objects were seen in the search zone for the
Boeing 777, about 2,500 kilometres off Perth.
Asked for details, Abbott
referred to “a number of small objects fairly close together within the
Australian search zone, including, as I understand it, a wooden pallet.”
The comments came hours after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) announced that “further attempts will be made to establish whether the objects sighted are related to MH370,” today.
The prime minister did not
specifically mention a Chinese satellite image dated March 18 and
released yesterday, which showed a large piece of floating debris close
to where previous satellite images showed two pieces of possible
wreckage in the remote ocean.
Abbott’s confidence was also supported, he said, by the growing resources being thrown at the hunt.
Two Chinese aircraft and two
Japanese Orions were today due to join the six aircraft already involved
in the huge operation, the prime minister said.
“Obviously the more aircraft
we have, the more ships we have, the more confident we are of recovering
whatever material is down there,” he said.“And obviously before we can
be too specific about what it might be, we do actually need to recover
some of this material.”
Abbott, speaking as he ended a visit to neighbouring Papua New Guinea, praised the international search effort.
“I want to say that this is a
really big international effort and it does show that many countries
are capable of pulling together in a time of trouble.
“It is a very important
humanitarian exercise. We owe it to the almost 240 people on board the
plane, we owe it to their grieving families, we owe it to the
governments of the countries concerned, to do everything we can to
discover as much as we can about the fate of MH370.”
MH370 dropped off civilian
radar on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and two weeks
later Malaysian investigators still believe it was deliberately diverted
by someone on board.
—AFP
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