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Four Years After Jet Vanished, Malaysia Still Open for a Search

Four Years After Jet Vanished, Malaysia Still Open for a Search

(Bloomberg) -- Malaysia’s government is still open to the idea of resuming the world’s longest search for a missing jet, even after a multimillion-dollar scouring of the oceans over several years failed to find anything substantial.

“We are open to possibilities, but we must have credible leads before we decide,” Minister of Transport Anthony Loke Siew Fook said Friday near Kuala Lumpur. “Any search decision would have to go back to the cabinet.”

Malaysia Airlines MH370 vanished in March 2014 while on a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board. Numerous countries searched for the plane from South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and gave up, failing to solve modern aviation’s biggest mystery. Very little of the plane was found, apart from some small debris that washed up near Africa. On Friday, relatives of the passengers of the ill-fated flight handed over to the minister more pieces of the aircraft’s remains in an effort to spur interest in a new search.

In July, the government published a final report on the plane’s disappearance. The 449-page document said the plane was probably steered off course deliberately and flown to the southern Indian Ocean. This year, Malaysia, grappling with the widest budget deficit in five years, put an end to several extensions of various searches for the jet.

To contact the reporter on this story: Yudith Ho in Kuala Lumpur at yho35@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anand Krishnamoorthy at anandk@bloomberg.net, Sam Nagarajan

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.