Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Monday that he would be “happy to reopen” the search for flight MH370 if “compelling” evidence arrived, paving the way for a further search a decade after the plane vanished.
“If there is compelling evidence that it needs to be reopened, we will certainly be happy to reopen it,” he said when asked about the matter during a visit to Melbourne.
His remarks came as the families remembered ten years since the jet disappeared in the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board.
“I don’t believe it is a technological issue. It’s a problem that affects people’s lives, and whatever is necessary must be done,” he said.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777, disappeared from radar screens on March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Despite the most extensive search in aviation history, the plane was never recovered, and the effort was halted in January 2017.
A decade-long search yields no trace of the vanished MH370
Approximately 500 relatives and supporters gathered Sunday at a retail center near Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur for a “remembrance day,” with many clearly affected with sadness.
Some of the relatives traveled from China, where nearly two-thirds of the passengers on MH370 were from.
“The last 10 years have been a nonstop emotional rollercoaster for me,” Grace Nathan, a 36-year-old Malaysian lawyer whose mother, Anne Daisy, 56, was on the flight, told AFP.
Speaking to the gathering, she urged the Malaysian government to conduct a new search. Transport Minister Anthony Loke told reporters that “as far as Malaysia is concerned, it is committed to finding the plane… cost is not an issue”.
He informed family at the gathering that he would meet with executives from the Texas-based marine exploration firm Ocean Infinity, which had previously undertaken a fruitless search, to discuss a new operation.
“We are now awaiting for them to provide suitable dates and I hope to meet them soon,” he said.
An earlier Australian-led search of 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) in the Indian Ocean yielded little evidence of the jet, with only a few pieces of debris recovered.