The US is fully committed to providing more assets to assist in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, US President Barack Obama said yesterday.
“I can tell you the United States is absolutely committed to providing whatever resources and assets that we can,” Obama told a joint news conference in Kuala Lumpur held with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Obama’s comments came as a US Navy submersible drone scanned a patch of the Indian Ocean seabed yesterday in a so far fruitless bid to find the jet, as bad weather scuppered an air and sea surface search.
Photo: Reuters
More than seven weeks after the Boeing 777 disappeared en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board on March 8 and six weeks since the search moved to the Indian Ocean, authorities are regrouping to decide how to proceed.
“We are currently consulting very closely with our international partners on the best way to continue the search into the future,” the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in charge of the search told reporters in an e-mail.
Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Britain and the US are assisting Australia in trying to solve the most expensive search in aviation history.
Photo: EPA
“Obviously, we don’t know all the details, but we do know [that] if in fact the plane went down in the ocean on this part of this world, there is a big place and it is very challenging effort and laboriously effort,” Obama said. “It is going to take quite some time.”
A US defense official told reporters on Friday that the search is likely to drag on for years as it enters the much more difficult phase of scouring broader areas of the ocean near where the aircraft is believed to have crashed.
Australia and Malaysia are under growing pressure to bring closure to the grieving families of those on board MH370, with Kuala Lumpur also being pressured to improve its disclosure about its investigation.
However, Obama said that US authorities had found the Malaysian government to be “fully forthcoming” in sharing information.
Najib has said that his administration will make public a preliminary report into the plane’s disappearance this week.
The previous week, Acting Malaysian Minister of Transport Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters that authorities would be “increasing the assets that are available for deep-sea search” and that Kuala Lumpur was seeking help from state oil company Petronas, as it has expertise in deep-sea exploration.
The empty expanse of water about 1,600km northwest of Western Australia State’s capital, Perth, is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest.
Until now, the undersea search has been focused on a 10km2 circular zone after a series of “pings” detected earlier this month led authorities to believe the plane’s black box flight recorders may be located there.
The subsea search is set to be extended beyond that small area if the US Navy’s Bluefin-21 drone fails to find anything, the search center said on Saturday.
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