Chinese families stage mass walkout, demanded China's inquiry into mysterious Flight MH370

Lone voice: The Malaysian delegation listening to the Chinese committee member talk in the hotel ballroom in Beijing. - AFP

BEIJING: Family members of Chinese passengers on board MH370 staged a mass walkout during a briefing by a high-level Malaysian delegation here.

A member of the committee that represents the relatives had asked them to leave the Lido Hotel ballroom as a show of discontent.

The families are convinced that the Malaysian authorities were hiding facts concerning the airliner, which had gone missing with 239 passengers and crew members.

Delegation members had just finished answering questions posed to them by the families a day earlier when the committee member stood up and addressed the crowd.

“Have you heard any updates related to our loved ones from the delegation?” he asked. “Have you heard any answers from the delegation in response to our key queries?”

The crowd shouted “No” in unison.

The man then asked the family members to leave the ballroom and to go “discuss the next course of action” with the committee in another room.

He stressed that the families should do so voluntarily.

After all the relatives had left, the man posed several questions to the delegation and then concluded with: “You have seen from the incident today that the Chinese people and the next-of-kin are united.

“What you are hiding now will ultimately see the light of the day. There will certainly be people who will receive due punishment.”

Despite the awkwardness of the situation, members of the delegation remained seated at the front of the ballroom.

They were Malaysian ambassador to China Datuk Iskandar Sarudin, Royal Malaysian Air Force air operations commander Lt-Jen Datuk Seri Ackbal Abdul Samad, Department of Civil Aviation air traffic services director Ahmad Nizar Zolfakar and representatives from Malaysia Airlines.

Lt-Jen Ackbal then spoke to the man.

“We would like to ask you how we can move forward from here. We have been trying our best to keep you updated and we have nothing to hide.

“We are telling you what we can tell. There are a few ongoing inquiries and we can only reveal information that will not jeopardise the investigations,” he said.

The representative retorted: “I do not want to hear you saying that you need to go back and check when we ask you simple questions.

“You no longer have to protect the safety of hostages. Which one do you put first, national interest or (the) search and rescue mission?”

After that, the man asked the delegation and news media to leave the ballroom because the families wanted the place for a closed-door meeting.

As the family members started streaming back in, the delegation and newsmen stood up and left.

Yesterday’s meeting was the sixth between the delegation and the families; one session lasted seven hours without a break.

Sources: The Star/Asia News Network

Chinese MH370 relatives demand Beijing probe 
- The Economic Times:

 

The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Related: 

China stresses importance of international cooperation on MH370 search

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The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

News of the letter comes as a committee set up by relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers has begun discussions with lawyers  ..

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppstThe document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

BEIJING: Relatives of the Chinese passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have demanded China mount its own inquiry into the disappearance, a letter shows.

The document, sent to Beijing's special envoy in Kuala Lumpur, denounced Malaysia's handling of the search and asked the Chinese government to set up its own "investigation office".

News of the letter comes as a committee set up by relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers has begun discussions with lawyers .. Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/32831901.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Black box scanners arrive Australia as search for MH370 pins hope on new satellite images

Underwater scanners that will be used to try to locate the black box flight recorders from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have arrived at the search headquarters in Australia, as crews pin their hopes on new satellite images showing 300 pieces of possible debris in the southern Indian Ocean.

The new information came as strong winds and icy weather forced planes and ships to call off their search on Thursday of an area where officials believe the plane came down almost three weeks ago.

Australian maritime officials said several planes had reached the search zone, located about 1,550 miles (2,500 km) south-west of Perth, but had returned early without finding any of the floating debris.

Sam Cardwell, a spokesman for the Australian maritime safety authority, said the planes had stayed in the area for about two hours. "They got a bit of time in, but it was not useful because there was no visibility," he said.

The bad weather is expected to last well into Friday, raising the possibility that the hunt for hundreds of pieces of debris that could be from MH370 will not resume until the weekend.

The arrival of sensitive tracking equipment offers a glimmer of hope for a breakthrough in what has become the biggest mystery in commercial aviation history.

An Australian naval vessel ship will sweep the seabed by towing an underwater listening device deep below the surface in the hope of picking up an ultrasonic signal from one or both of the plane's black box recorders, while a small submersible drone will be used to scan the sea floor for signs of wreckage.

Thursday's search involved 11 planes and five ships in an area of the vast southern Indian Ocean where officials believe the plane ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all 239 people aboard.

They were trying to locate 122 objects captured in French satellite images on 23 March that senior Malaysian officials described as the most credible lead yet as to the jetliner's whereabouts.

Later on Thursday, Thailand said it had satellite images showing 300 floating objects floating in roughly the same area. The objects, ranging in length from two to 15 metres, were found about 125 miles from the site where the French satellite had earlier spotted more than 100 pieces of debris.

Anond Snidvongs, executive director of Thailand's space technology development agency, said the information had been passed on to Malaysia. "But we cannot – dare not – confirm they are debris from the plane," he told AFP.

Officials from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said Thursday's search had been split into two areas totalling 78,000 sq km (30,000 square miles). The operation involves planes and ships from the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Locating and retrieving at least some of the floating objects could prove crucial in the absence of any physical evidence supporting the theory that MH370 ran out of fuel hours after it turned sharply off course and disappeared from air traffic controllers' screens over the South China Sea en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Search teams are hoping that the detection equipment will be able to pick up acoustic pings emitted every second from the plane's black box flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

Each of the two recorders has a beacon, attached to the outside of the black box, which once activated by contact with water makes a sound every second.

But it is a race against time: the beacons have a battery life of 30 days, after which the pings begin to fade. Chuck Schofield of Dukane Seacom, a company that has sold the pingers to Malaysia Airlines, told Associated Press that the batteries might last an additional five days before dying.

Assuming that the plane crashed on 8 March, as Malaysian officials insist, that means the beacons aboard MH370 will begin to fade around 7 April and could go silent around 12 April.

The US navy tracking equipment – a special listening device known as a "towed pinger locator" and an underwater drone dubbed Bluefin-21 – has arrived in Perth, where the international effort is based and is being sent to the search site.

Reports said the equipment would be loaded on to the Australian navy's HMAS Ocean Shield, which will drag the locator through the water in the hope of picking up a signal.

The drone can dive to depths of about 4,500 metres, using sonar to form images of the ocean floor. Similar technology was used to locate the main wreckage from Air France flight 447 in 2011 – yet it still took searchers two years to recover the black box from the depths of the Atlantic.

The operation has been hampered by bad weather and conditions, prolonging the anguish of relatives after Malaysian officials said they had concluded that the aircraft had crashed into the sea with the loss of all on board.

Experts said search crews faced significant dangers due to frequent bad weather and the area's distance from land. "This is a really rough piece of ocean, which is going to be a terrific issue," Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, told Associated Press. "I worry that people carrying out the rescue mission are going to get into trouble."

Criticism of the Malaysian authorities' handling of the incident has continued, with relatives of the 154 Chinese passengers on board MH370 ridiculing Malaysian government and airline officials at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines ran a full-page message of condolence in the New Straits Times. "Our sincerest condolences go out to the loved ones of the 239 passengers, friends and colleagues. Words alone cannot express our enormous sorrow and pain," it said.

Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, according to Xinhua.

Several Chinese celebrities took to social media to voice anger at the Malaysian government. In a widely shared post on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, the singer and actor Chen Kun said he would boycott Malaysian goods, while the Hong Kong-born actor Deric Wan called for evidence that the plane had crashed.

"What Chinese people wanted was the truth of the missing plane instead of a pointless press conference," he said on Weibo, according to China Daily.

But in an opinion piece in Thursday's Global Times, Wang Wenwen said that while Malaysia had handled the crash aftermath ineptly, raw emotion should not be allowed to determine relations between the Chinese and Malaysian governments. "It is too early to let public opinion lead the way at the current stage. Whether Beijing-Kuala Lumpur relations will dim depends to some extent on how the [Chinese] government will act between diplomatic manoeuvering and public opinion."

The New Zealand family of Paul Weeks, one of the passengers, added their voice to criticism of the Malaysian authorities. "The whole situation has been handled appallingly, incredibly insensitively," Sara Weeks, the missing man's sister, told Radio Live in New Zealand.

"Everyone is angry about it. "The Malaysian government, the airline – it's just all been incredibly poor. Who's to say they couldn't have located the plane the day that it happened?" - The Guardian


Don't let extreme feelings preempt MH370 findings

 

A ground crew member directs a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion upon its returns to RAAF base Pearce from searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 over the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday. Photo: AFP

Monday was a dramatic day for the Chinese relatives of those aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that disappeared over two weeks ago.

After the Malaysian side announced that the airliner had "ended in the southern Indian Ocean" and none of the passengers survived, relatives of the 154 Chinese citizens on board became furious. They released a statement accusing the Malaysian government of being "murderers" and protested outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing the next day.

These families have the support of the Chinese people, notably with doubts over the information released by the Malaysian side and criticism against the Malaysian government on China's social media.

When Victor Wong, a Chinese-Malaysian singer well known among the Chinese public, expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims on his Sina Weibo account, a flurry of comments followed, blaming him for being hypocritical and calling for a boycott of his performances in China.

Many also urged the Chinese government to take a tough stance toward Malaysia, which is thought by many to have mishandled the search for the missing plane.

This mysterious accident is being followed by the world, as are China's reactions. In the eyes of some Western observers, China is "doing its best to foster a sense of aggrievement" and "exploiting international incidents for domestic gain."

Indeed, Malaysia should take most of the blame as it dragged this painful accident on for too long. Its approach in handling the aftermath of the tragedy raised doubts from international watchers. The grievances of the Chinese people didn't come from nowhere.

There have already been analyses in the foreign media speculating on a strained relationship between China and Malaysia, despite the fact that Malaysia was the first ASEAN country to establish diplomatic ties with China in 1974 and that Malaysia is China's largest trading partner among ASEAN countries.

China's tourist agencies have reported a sharp decline in the number of Chinese travelers choosing to visit Malaysia.

The past few years have seen the Chinese government facing increasing pressure from the public in making diplomatic decisions. There is a worrying sign that the public mood might be fanned by some opinion leaders at the price of ruining good people-to-people relationship between the two countries.

It is too early to let public opinion lead the way at the current stage. Whether Beijing-Kuala Lumpur relations will dim depends to some extent on how the government will act between diplomatic maneuvering and public opinion.  - Global Times

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Families filing lawsuits over MH370 while new 122 objects identified by a French satellite

A model of a Boeing 777 aircraft is displayed as representatives of US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International hold a media briefing at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur on March 26, 2014. Family members of the victims of the ill-fated Flight MH370 are filing a RM4.95 billion (S$1.9 billion) suit for compensation, against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines. -- PHOTO: AFP 

KUALA LUMPUR - Family members of the victims of the ill-fated Flight MH370 are filing a RM4.95 billion (S$1.9 billion) suit for compensation, against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines.

Chicago-based firm Ribbeck Law Chartered, who is acting on behalf of the family members, has started proceedings by filing a petition of discovery in an Illinois court.

Ms Monica Kelly, the lead lawyer from Ribbeck Law, said the firm which specialises in aviation law had been approached by family members from China and Indonesia.

Of the 239 people on board MH370, there were 153 China nationals and seven Indonesians.

Ms Kelly said they had spoken to family members in many countries and expected about half of those affected to take part in the suit.

She said the fact that neither the wreckage of MH370 nor the bodies of the pasengers have been found would not affect the case, as they would be inspecting the rest of the MAS fleet for similar design flaws.

"We've had successful cases where the plane, the victims or even the blackbox were not found," said Ms Kelly, during a briefing with the press in Kuala Lumpur.

"We have done many cases where wreckage was completely destroyed, or no bodies found, or wreckage found but no black boxes working. We are not relying on these things to start the legal process," said Kelly, during a briefing to the press here.

She said such suits can take anywhere between four months to five years, but expects this case to take between one-and-a-half to two years.

The firm would focus its suit against Boeing, as they believe it was a case of equipment malfunction but could expand the defendants to include other component manufacturers or even those who trained the crew. 

A Malaysia Airlines spokesman said the airline is aware of the lawsuit.

"Our lawyers have been advised of this development.

" At this point in time, our top priority remains to provide any and all assistance to the families of the passengers and crew.

"Other matters will be dealt with appropriately," the spokesman said in a statement.

Mr Manuel Von Ribbeck of Ribbeck Law said they are 100 per cent confident of winning the suit, as according to the law, passengers are never at fault.

Mr Ribbeck said the coverage for compensation is about RM4.95 billion, and the firm would demand the full amount be paid.

For the purpose of the lawsuit, the firm assumes that the passengers are dead, based on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's announcement.

"We hope that miracles can happen, but based on the data we've seen so far, it does not look good for the flight and her passengers," said Mr Ribbeck.

Boeing, the manufacturers of the 777-200 aircraft, has been on the receiving end of a number of lawsuits in the past.

The most recent lawsuit was in January this year by a group of passengers, represented by Mr Ribbeck Law, who were aboard an Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed in San Francisco on July 6 last year.

Three people were killed and more than 180 others hurt.

France's Satellite imagery shows 122 'potential objects'

This handout picture received from the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) on March 27, 2014 shows imagery taken on March 23 by a French satellite showing more than 100 floating objects (within higlighted boxes) in the remote southern Indian Ocean.

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) has identified 122 “potential objects” that could be linked to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in an area of the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,557km from Perth.

The MRSA had analysed satellite images provided by France’s Airbus Defence and Space.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said the new development supported “the most credible lead” for focusing the search in the southern Indian Ocean, alluding to the analysis of British investigators that pointed to the area.

The objects were in an area of about 400sq km, he told the daily press conference at the Putra World Trade Centre here yesterday.

“Some objects are a metre in length, others as much as 23m long. Some of the objects appeared to be bright, indicating they are possibly solid,” he said.

Hishammuddin, who is also Defence Minister, added that the MRSA findings were immediately forwarded to the Australian Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Perth.

“It must be emphasised that we cannot tell whether the potential objects are from MH370.

“Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation,” he said.

Hishammuddin said the search operation now had four separate satellite leads, from Australia, China and France, showing possible debris.

What had to be done now was to determine whether it was really debris and linked to MH370, he added.

Hishammuddin said Australia was leading the search effort in the southern Indian Ocean while Malaysia continued its coordinating role.

“Australia has divided the search area into two sectors: East and West.

“With the improved weather, 12 planes were deployed to the search area – six in the East sector and six in the West,” he said.

In the East sector, the search would be conducted by one Australian P3 Orion, and three Australian civilian aircraft, one Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 and one New Zealand P3 Orion.

Involved in the West sector were a US P8 Poseidon, two Australian P3 Orions and one each from South Korea and Japan as well as a civilian aircraft.

Hishammuddin also said an international working group was helping refine Inmarsat data to further narrow the search area.

The working group – consisting of Inmarsat, the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Civil Aviation Administration of China, the US National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and Rolls Royce as well as the relevant Malaysian authorities – will attempt to determine more accurately the final position of MH370. - The Star/ANN

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