New Straits Times......
Malaysia Chronicle.....
22 April 2014| last updated at 06:51PM
MH370 Tragedy: 5 military aircrafts continue air search despite poor weather
KUALA LUMPUR : Five military aircraft continued air search despite poor weather in Perth, yesterday.
Bernama quoted the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) saying that four military aircraft had departed Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Pearce base despite an earlier decision to suspend air search activities for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on Tuesday.
“They were joined by an RAAF E7 Wedgetail aircraft to support airspace deconfliction that departed from RAAF Base Learmonth,” said JACC in its statement.
Bernama reported that the aircraft would continue their missions with captains assessing the weather conditions and use their discretion as to whether they would continue their planned search activities or return to base.
JACC on Tuesday had earlier said air search activities for the day were suspended due to poor weather conditions in the search area as a result of Tropical Cyclone Jack.
“The heavy seas and poor visibility would make any air search activities ineffective and potentially hazardous.”
“The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totaling approximately 49,491 square kilometres. The centre of the search area lies approximately 1584 kilometres north west of Perth.” said JACC.
It said the 10 ships involved in yesterday’s search however continued with their planned activities as usual.
“The Bluefin-21 AUV was currently completing mission nine in the underwater operations and had completed approximately two thirds of the focused underwater search area with no contacts of interest found to date.”
JACC said the focused underwater search area was defined as a circle of 10 kilometres radius around the second Towed Pinger Locator detection which occurred on 8 April.
The Beijing-bound Malaysia Airline flight MH370 disappeared with 239 passengers and crew members on March 8. It was last detected in the southern Indian Ocean.
Malaysia Chronicle.....
Tuesday, 22 April 2014 15:30
DON'T TRY TO BUY US OVER! MH370 families want evidence of crash from M'sian govt before death certs issued
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KUALA LUMPUR - The partner of an American passenger on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has questioned the satellite data analysis, which concluded that the plane ended in the southern Indian Ocean, where the current search operation is being conducted.
In an email on behalf of “The United Families of MH370”, Ms Sara Bacj, whose partner Philip Wood is among the 239 people on board MH370, demanded an explanation from Putrajaya on why it went with the analysis by Inmarsat, the British satellite company.
“They have failed to share why they would accept a single source (Inmarsat) for analysis utilising a never-before-attempted method, as their sole grounds for determining that the plane is under the water and all lives lost,” the Wall Street Journal quoted her email sent to the media.
On March 24, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, in an emergency press conference, announced that flight MH370 had “ended” in a remote area in the Indian Ocean.
Malaysia Airlines had also informed affected relatives that there were no survivors.
Mr Najib later told Parliament that the announcement was made so as not to give the impression that the government had not been transparent.
“It is the responsibility of a nation’s leader and the commitment of the government to decide on making such an announcement. The decision was made even when we know its implications,” he said.
Ms Bacj, in her email however, questioned the absence of any independent scientific review of Inmarsat’s technical analysis, which led to Malaysia’s conclusion.
“We don’t expect that they find all of the plane, or all of the bodies, or even that they know everything about how this surreal situation happened, but we do expect at least a tiny bit of concrete evidence,” WSJ quoted another version of the email, written in Chinese and sent to relatives of Chinese passengers.
“We are in utter outrage, despair and shock!” the email concluded. -todayonline.com
Tuesday, 22 April 2014 15:32
WHERE ARE THEY HIDING MH370? Did M'sia, Australia, US deliberately lead the world on a WILD GOOSE CHASE?
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KIEL (Germany) - Search crews hunting for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may need to review the area of focus again because the absence of any surface debris suggests the correct location has still not been identified, said the German oceanographer who helped find the remains of Air France Flight AF447.
The optimism injected into the near-six week search after pinger signals were picked up may also prove ill-founded because the sounds could have come from sources other than the emergency beacons, said Dr Peter Herzig, executive director of the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Oceanographic Research in Kiel, Germany.
“People are talking about how it’s difficult to find a needle in a haystack, but right now, we don’t know where the haystack is,” Dr Herzig said in a telephone interview. “They need a much better definition of the crash area; they need to find debris and then need some time to do some modelling given that these parts may have moved over several weeks now.”
The longest search for an aircraft in modern civil aviation has yet to result in the retrieval of any physical objects connected to the Boeing 777 airliner, which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board. The hunt has now settled on a zone in the southern Indian Ocean, with an unmanned submarine performing deep-sea scans of the seabed, while ships and aircraft continue their surface missions to track down any pieces.
Dr Herzig contends that there has been no corroborated, unequivocal evidence that the pinging sounds, which have now ceased, were indeed related to MH370.
“What you do is, you ask for radio silence in the ocean and then you can check for pings”, to avoid interference from other sources, which may not have occurred in this case, he said.
It was a Remus 6000 submarine owned by Dr Herzig’s institute that located the wreckage of Air France AF447 in April 2011, in collaboration with two others from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute of Falmouth, Massachusetts. That cleared the way for remotely operated vehicles to go in and retrieve bodies and parts of the plane including the black boxes.
The Air France search took almost two years.
With planes and ships combing the Indian Ocean for signs of debris from MH370, it is unusual to draw a total blank, Dr Herzig said. Given that the force of an aircraft hitting the ocean is similar to a collision with concrete, this should leave at least some debris floating, as was the case with the Air France plane on route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, he said.
Dr Herzig’s institute is not involved in the underwater search. He said he spoke to the Malaysian Ambassador two weeks ago about participating at a later point and is awaiting further information. - BLOOMBERG
Tuesday, 22 April 2014 07:55
US, UK under SCRUTINY as MH370 conspiracy theory gains popularity
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Diego Garcia, a U.S.-controlled base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has been the focus of theories that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370 has flown there. Amid the speculation, a U.S. embassy official in Malaysia said the rumors are baseless and unfounded.
But amid scrutiny of the island, pressure has mounted on the U.K. over the CIA’s “black site” jail that is allegedly on Diego Garcia.
“We need to know immediately whether ministers misled parliament over CIA torture on British soil,” Cori Crider, the strategic director at Reprieve, which is a a legal action charity organization, told UK Foreign Secretary William Hague in a letter. “If the CIA operated a black site on Diego Garcia, then a string of official statements, from both this and the last government, were totally false,” Crider added, RT reported.
Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan rebel military commander and political opponent of ex-leader Moammar Gadhafi, said that he was sent to Diego Garcia in a joint U.S.-U.K. operation, reported The Guardian. He said that he was tortured in his rendition.
“The first time I heard that I had gone through a place called Diego Garcia was when I was told by the head of the Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, during my first interrogation session in a prison outside Tripoli,” Belhaj said, reported The Guardian.
“He was running the interrogation and was angry that it had taken a long time for me to arrive in Libya. I told him that the plane had stopped somewhere on the way from Bangkok. He told me that he knew, and that the plane had landed on an island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia,” he added.
The group Reprieve is representing Belhaj.
“The Foreign Secretary must urgently clarify whether the CIA ran a secret prison on Diego Garcia, and whether our clients Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar were among its victims,” Crider added. -ET
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