A woman in Malaysia writes a wish on the message board during the tenth annual remembrance event of the disappearance of Flight MH370 in March. - Photo: AP
PHNOM PENH (Khmer Times): While dismissing a foreign media report that parts of Malaysia Airlines MH370 could possibly be in a deep jungle of the Kingdom, Cambodia is ready to cooperate with the Malaysian authorities if there is a request to open an investigation into this case.
Sin Chanserivutha, spokesman and Undersecretary of State for the State Secretariat of Civil Aviation (SSCA), said yesterday that, “The media coverage of MH370 in Cambodia is fake”.
“We do not know the purpose of this false news, but we just know that they have bad intentions against Cambodia,” he said.
“This false media coverage and an image were published once about eight years ago, and it has just been revised again and republished recently, which has created confusion,” he said.
The remarks come after a British-based newspaper, The Mirror reported that: “MH370 mystery ‘solved’ by Google Maps as plane remains ‘found’ in darkest part of Cambodian jungle”.
Chanserivutha said that if international researchers or whoever have found or have enough evidence to prove that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane was found in Cambodia’s jungle then Cambodian authorities are ready to cooperate with the Malaysian authorities.
If there is a request to open an investigation into this case, the Cambodian authorities are ready to cooperate, he added.
Ian Wilson, a self-professed expert from the UK, was quoted by The Mirror on Saturday that the remains of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane – which vanished carrying 239 people en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing – are scattered deep in a jungle in Cambodia.
He said, “Measuring the Google sighting, you’re looking at around 69 metres, but there looks to be a gap between the tail and the back of the plane. It’s just slightly bigger, but there’s a gap that would probably account for that.”
The plane’s disappearance sparked the largest-ever search operation for an aircraft, and remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries of our time. However, the search could be restarted after new investigations in the US.
The flight took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, but it disappeared during a handover between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers.
Wilson said, “I was on there (Google Earth) a few hours here, a few hours there. If you added it up I spent hours searching for places a plane could have gone down. And in the end, as you can see the place where the plane is. It is literally the greenest, darkest part you can see.”
At the time of the incident, Cambodia sent two ships and four helicopters to aid in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
The Cambodia search entailed 80 naval and army personnel and included flights over Cambodian land and sea. However, no trace of the plane was found in the search.
In March, the BBC reported that in the aftermath of MH370’s disappearance, a massive search ensued that continued for four years and cost millions of dollars. Even after official recovery efforts ended, amateur sleuths continued trying to locate the ill-fated plane, which disappeared from radar less than 40 minutes into the flight.
The report questioned if the mystery of the lost flight was any closer to being solved, ten years on – or, at least – if the wreckage of the plane might be located?
It said some of the searchers who have been trying to solve the mysterious case for the past decade are saying, “yes”.
It went on to say that Richard Godfrey, a retired British aerospace engineer and creator of the website ‘The Search for MH370’, and who has dedicated much of the past 10 years to solving the mystery, is convinced it would only take one more search in the correct location to find the aircraft.
Separately, Vincent Lyne, a former researcher from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania, who has published numerous papers on the topic, has also been conducting his own independent investigation and is certain that the location of the plane is not a mystery.
“The precise location of MH370 is in a very deep 6,000-metre hole about 1,500 kilometres west of Perth and along the longitude of Penang,” said Lyne.
“That location reconciles all evidence,” he claimed.
The BBC report questioned how did Godfrey and Lyne each grow so sure about the plane’s exact location when years of official searches turned up nothing?
Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.41am on March 8, 2014, and was scheduled to arrive in Beijing Capital International Airport at 6.30am local time. But what happened next has baffled analysts.
Air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur last heard from plane when pilots on the flight communicated to indicate that the plane was moving into another country’s airspace en route to Beijing.
“After 40 minutes, it disappeared from civilian radar,” said Alessandra Bonomolo, director of a new documentary BBC podcast on the plane’s disappearance, “Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370”.
“There were communications a few minutes prior between the pilots and air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur who exchanged a brief conversation, which is entirely customary when they say that they are going to move on to a different airspace – (which) in that case would have been Vietnamese airspace,” Bonomolo explained in the podcast.
“And after that ‘goodnight,’ the air traffic controllers in Malaysia know that they are no longer responsible for that plane because it entered another nation’s airspace.”
“It was at the border of Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace that the plane disappeared and stopped communicating with air traffic controllers entirely,” says Bonomolo. And that’s where the mystery begins.
Meanwhile, Associated Press had reported that Malaysian officials said they may renew the hunt for MH370, after a US company that tried to find the plane in 2018 proposed a fresh search in the southern Indian Ocean where the Malaysia Airlines plane is believed to have crashed.
Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke said he would invite Texas-based marine robotics firm Ocean Infinity to brief him on its latest “no find, no fee” proposal. The government has long said it would not support another search without new leads on the aircraft’s location.
If the evidence is credible, he said, he will seek Cabinet approval to sign a new contract to resume the search.
“The government is steadfast in our resolve to locate MH370,” Loke told a memorial event marking the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the jet in March, adding, “We really hope the search can find the plane and provide truth to the next-of-kin.”
