Monday 24 March 2014

BREAKING NEWS:Malaysia Airlines sent a text message to relatives of passengers on MH370 to tell them the plane had crashed.


(CNN) -- Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down over the southern Indian Ocean, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday, citing a new analysis of satellite data by a British satellite compan and accident investigators, and apparently ending hopes that anyone survived.A relative of a missing passenger briefed by the airline in Beijing said, "They have told us all lives are lost."Razak based his announcement on what he described as unprecedented analysis of satellite data sent by the plane by British satellite provider Inmarsat and the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch. He didn't describe the nature of the analysis.But he said it made it clear that the plane's last position was in the middle of the remote southern Indian Ocean, "far from any possible landing sites."






He begged reporters to respect the privacy of relatives.
"For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking," he said. "I know this news must be harder still."
Razak's statement came after the airline sent a text message to relatives saying it "deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH 370 has been lost and that none of those onboard survived."
Reporters could hear wailing coming from a briefing for relatives of missing passenger in Beijing. A woman walked out of a briefing for relatives near Kuala Lumpur crying.
A Facebook page dedicated to the only American aboard the flight, Philip Wood, said of relatives that "our collective hearts are hurting now."
"Please lift all the loved ones of MH370 with your good thoughts and prayers," a post on the page said.
Debris spotted in Indian Ocean
The announcement came the same day as Australian officials said they had spotted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that could be related to the flight, which has been missing since March 8 with 239 people aboard.
One object is "a grey or green circular object," and the other is "an orange rectangular object," the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
The objects are the latest in a series of sightings, including "suspicious objects" reported earlier Monday by a Chinese military plane that was involved in search efforts in the same region, authorities said.
So far, nothing has been definitively linked to Flight 370.
Earlier, Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia's acting transportation minister, said only that "at the moment, there are new leads but nothing conclusive."
A reporter on board the Chinese plane for China's official Xinhua news agency said the search team saw "two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometers," the agency reported Monday.
The Chinese plane was flying at 33,000 feet on its way back to Australia's west coast when it made the sighting, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
But a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft, one of the military's most sophisticated reconnaissance planes, that was tasked to investigate the objects was unable to find them, the authority said.
With the search in its third week, authorities have so far been unable to establish where exactly the missing plane is or why it flew off course from its planned journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
China has a particularly large stake in the search: Its citizens made up about two-thirds of the 227 passengers on the missing Boeing 777. Beijing has repeatedly called on Malaysian authorities, who are in charge of the overall search, to step up efforts to find the plane.
Malaysian and Australian authorities appeared to be more interested Monday in the two objects spotted by a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft.
The Australian's navy's HMAS Success "is on scene and is attempting to locate the objects," the Australian maritime authority said.
Hishammuddin said Australian authorities had said the objects could be retrieved "within the next few hours, or by tomorrow morning at the latest."

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