It has been more than a week since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 lost contact with air traffic controllers, tracking radars and communications satellites alike.

On Saturday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak stepped onto the podium again and announced to a nervous and expectant audience in Kuala Lumpur and beyond that latest evidence had shown MH370 to have made an about turn and headed toward the Indian Ocean, as opposed to the South China Sea as was earlier surmised, before it went totally mute. The communication devices onboard also appeared to have been deliberately switched off.

After this latest round of information sharing, there were those who were quick to condemn the “wasteful” and “unproductive” aerial and maritime searches conducted over a vast expanse of the South China Sea as having been misguided from the start.

… The author is a senior fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.