MALAYSIA: The four-year hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has ended with the latest, privately funded search coming to a close.
US-based Ocean Infinity had been using a deep-sea vessel to survey a vast area of the southern Indian Ocean.
But it found nothing and Malaysia’s government says it has no plans to begin any new searches.
The plane disappeared on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Official search efforts ended last year and there are still fierce debates about what happened to the flight.
Grace Nathan, whose mother was on MH370, said she was opposed to ending the hunt.
“People might think: ‘Why are these people still harping on about this, it’s been four years’. It’s important for people to remember that MH370 is not history,” she told the Guardian newspaper. The hunt was officially meant to end late April but was extended. However, the new government of Mahathir Mohamad, which came to power after a shock election win this month, announced last week the search was set to end.
Texas-based Ocean Infinity said in a statement Tuesday that “its current search for the wreckage of... Flight MH370 is shortly coming to an end”.
A spokesman added the hunt would end in the coming days, without giving a precise date.
The new hunt was in an area of about 25,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean, north of the previous search zone.
The ship conducting the hunt, Seabed Constructor, was a Norwegian research vessel carrying 65 crew, including two members of the Malaysian navy as the government’s representatives.
It scoured the waters for wreckage using eight autonomous drones equipped with sonars and cameras, and able to operate at depths up to 6,000 metres (20,000 feet).
Only three confirmed fragments of MH370 have been found, all of them on western Indian Ocean shores, including a two-metre wing part known as a flaperon.
The jet’s disappearance stands as one of the most enduring aviation mysteries of all time and has spawned a host of theories, with some blaming a hijacking or even a terror plot.
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