By P Prem Kumar
KUALA LUMPUR (AA) – Malaysia’s transport minister confirmed Friday that a tripartite meeting with Australia and China will be held next month to decide whether to expand the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Liow Tiong Lai told reporters in administrative capital Putrajaya that teams would complete operations in the current 120,000 square kilometer (46,332 square mile) search area before the meeting.
“We will chart the future of the search during the meeting,” he said, assuring that efforts relating to the flight that vanished more than two years ago with 239 people on board would continue in the southern Indian Ocean.
“So far we have completed 105,000 square kilometers and will continue to search until we complete the 120,000 square kilometer area identified by experts,” he added.
The minister also expressed optimism about recovering more debris, or possibly the main wreckage of the missing aircraft, in the final phase of searching the current area.
“It is important that we find the wreckage of MH370. We need to look for the wreckage and analyze the cause of the incident,” Liow underlined.
The comments came a day after he announced that investigators had confirmed that two pieces of plane debris found in South Africa and the Mauritian island of Rodrigues “almost certainly” originated from MH370.
In March, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau — which is leading the search — revealed in a report that two pieces of debris found in Mozambique had been confirmed to “almost certainly” come from the flight.
In July last year, a part — later determined to be a flaperon from an MH370 wing — was found washed ashore on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar.
The flight disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
After 10 months of intensive undersea search for the vanished flight, on Jan. 29 2015 Malaysia declared that MH370 was lost in an accident, killing all passengers.
