11 March 2014
- RSIS
- Media Highlights
- No Headway in MH370 Search
Search and rescue for a missing Malaysian Airlines plane with 239 aboard, about two-thirds of them Chinese, made little headway on Monday, despite a rare multinational search that has been going on for over 60 hours.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director-general of Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation, told a press conference in Kuala Lumpur Monday night that oil slick samples and debris recovered in the South China Sea were not connected to the missing MH370, which disappeared around 50 minutes into its flight from the Malaysian capital to Beijing early Saturday.
“Unfortunately we have not found anything that appears to be objects from the aircraft, let alone the aircraft,” he said.
… Ei Sun Oh, a senior fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said that he doesn’t think the involved parties have been coordinating the efforts at the government-to-government level, but perhaps “at the operational levels, whereby ship talks to ship.”
Oh told the Global Times all sides must learn from this rare lesson and devise an emergency response coordination mechanism for future cases.
“China should better demonstrate its humanitarian search and rescue capabilities especially in situations like this, so as to reduce surrounding countries’ mistrust toward its intentions. This can reduce regional tension,” he said.
IDSS / RSIS / Print
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