SEPANG: With no new details, the search for MH370 has now been pushed further east into South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean, said acting transport minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein.
"The priority remains finding the plane," he told reporters at a packed press conference at the Sama Sama hotel near KLIA.
Thirteen countries are now involved in the operation with 57 ships and 48 aircraft.
MH370 with 239 crew and passengers disappeared from the radar screen at 1.30am Saturday enroute to Beijing.
As to the different speculation on the whereabouts of the plane, Hishammuddin said they would not publicly release any information until the information has been verified and corroborated.
He said the search had been extended to both sides of Peninsular Malaysia as "nothing had been found yet."
He refused to address US media reports, citing unnamed US officials, that the Boeing 777 had flown for an additional four or five hours after vanishing from civilian radar.
"We do not want to be drawn into specific remarks that unnamed officials have reportedly made in the media," he said.
One of the reports were based on information that the plane's communication system continued to "ping" a satellite for up to four hours after it disappeared early Saturday.
On the possibility of flight MH370 making a turn back towards the Strait of Malacca, Hishammuddin said the information could not be fully confirmed.
He said that although there was information of a flight turn back, "it could not be 100 per cent identified as MH370 that is why we expanded search to the Malacca Strait."
"This is crucial. I would be the happiest person if we could get confirmation as we could move all our assets (to the Strait of Malacca)," he said.
He added that they could also not confirm the possibility of a hijacking on board the plane or whether the data transponder was deliberately shut off.
"We are looking at all possibilities," he said.
When asked about the Vietnamese government's decision to downscale their search operations, he said they took it positively.
"They allowed us to conduct operations in their waters," he said, adding that two oil slicks found 60 nautical miles of the last known position of the plane were not from MH370.
A US Navy official said the destroyer USS Kidd was being sent to the Indian Ocean - on the opposite side of the Malaysian peninsula from where contact was lost - to investigate.
But Hishammuddin insisted that the main reason for widening the search field was the failure to locate the plane in the areas searched so far.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time," he said.
"But this is not a normal investigation. In this case, the information we have forces us to look further and further afield."
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