Leads Surrounding Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane Turn No Results
Published at
How Foo Yeen/Getty Images(KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia) — The mystery surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 continues to deepen as every lead that emerges about the plane seems to evaporate.
On Thursday, reports surfaced that the missing jetliner could have flown for more than four hours after it vanished from the radar, but Malaysian officials knocked that theory down.
“I would like to refer to news reports suggesting that the aircraft may have continued flying for some time after the last contact. As the airlines will confirm shortly, those reports are inaccurate,” Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said at a news conference Thursday.
He added that Boeing and Rolls Royce have no such data from the plane’s engines.
“Since today’s media reports, we asked both Rolls Royce and Boeing specifically about the data. As far as Rolls Royce and Boeing are concerned, those reports are inaccurate,” Hussein said.
Satellite images that were posted on a Chinese government website showing three unidentified floating objects in the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam also proved to be nothing.
The blurry images were taken by Chinese satellites on Sunday and loaded Wednesday onto the Sastind website, which is operated by China’s national defense science and technology ministry. It described one of the images as “some debris in the area where the Malaysian Airlines passenger plane lost contact and was suspected to crash.”
“A Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency plane was dispatched this morning to investigate potential debris shown on Chinese satellite images. We deployed our assets but found nothing,” Hussein said.
He added, “We have contacted the Chinese embassy, who notified us this afternoon that the images were released by mistake and did not show any debris from MH-370.”
It’s now been six days since the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared. Hussein said officials are doing all they can to find the plane or its wreckage.
“We have extended the search area because it is our duty to follow every lead. And we owe it to the families. And trust me when I say we will not give up,” he said.
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio