Aussie PM Abbott stands by decision to release satellite images
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is standing by his decision yesterday to release information on the sighting of two possible objects related to flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, despite being questioned on whether he had been too quick to make the announcement in parliament.
“Since then, we’ve been throwing everything we’ve got at that area to try to learn more about what this debris might be. It could just be a container that’s fallen off a ship; we just don’t know,” Abbott told The Guardian.
“But we owe it to the families and the friends and the loved ones of the almost 240 people on flight MH370 to do everything we can to try to resolve what is as yet as an extraordinary riddle.
“We owe it to them to do everything we can to resolve this. And because of the understandable state of anxiety and apprehension that they’re in, we also owe it to them to give them information… and I think I was doing that yesterday in the parliament.”
Abbott was also quoted as saying that he had alerted Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak of the developments shortly after receiving “credible evidence that there was debris in the southern Indian Ocean very close to the southern search corridor for ill-fated flight MH370”.
Search planes are still trying to find the objects detected on satellite, but Abbott said the families of passengers and crew aboard the missing flight deserved to be told information as soon as it came to hand.
The Australian prime minister also said that the search area in the southern Indian Ocean was extremely remote, but assured relatives that all efforts would be made to find the objects.
“If there is anything down there we will find it. We owe it to the families of those people to do no less,” he said.
Families of the passengers and crew members on board the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jetliner have been waiting for exactly two weeks now to find out what happened to their loved ones since the aircraft went missing on March 8.
Patience is running thin as families are finding that the Malaysia authorities are not giving them much information.
This had led to various publications, such as The Economist, criticising Malaysia’s approach on handling the issue, saying that the country has only been providing information “in dribs and drabs, much of it confusing, even contradictory”.
A special briefing for the families at 9pm last night by Putrajaya, Malaysia Airlines and the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) at the Cyberview Resort & Spa in Cyberjaya, Selangor, again failed to provide them with answers.
The search for the Malaysian jet is the longest in modern passenger-airline history. The previous record was the 10-day search for a Boeing 737-400 operated by Indonesia’s PT Adam Skyconnection Airlines, which went missing off the coast of Sulawesi on January 1, 2007. – March 21, 2014.
