Malaysia, Aussie, China to discuss status of MH370 search in June

Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia, Australia and China will hold a ministerial meeting on missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 in June end to discuss the next steps to be taken regarding the tracking of the jet mysteriously disappeared over two years ago.

The meeting would, among others, discuss whether to proceed with phase 4 of wreckage recovery process or continue with current search efforts led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Malaysia's Deputy Transport Minister Ab Aziz Kaprawi said on Thursday.

"A total of 103,000 sq km out of the 120,000 sq km of the designated search area at the Southern Indian Ocean have been covered so far. It will take about two more months to complete the whole area," he said.

He said Malaysia would also seek assistance from Mozambique, where the debris said to belong to MH370 was found.

Malaysia would request for Mozambique authorities advice if there was any further discovery of debris there and to decide on whether it would send its team there, he said.

"Other than the flaperon and other debris found so far, there is no new discovery (apart from those mentioned in the report) including the stenciled key words and numbers on the horizontal stabiliser and the wing, which fully matches the font used by Malaysia Airlines," he said.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre MH370 Operational Search in its latest update yesterday stated that the governments have agreed that there will be no further expansion of the search area in the absence of credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft.

The Boeing 777 jetliner vanished from radar screens en route to Beijing after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 2014 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. Australia is leading the underwater search effort to find the plane in the southern Indian Ocean.