A Malaysian airliner with 239 people, including five Indians, on board en route to China has gone missing and is presumed to have crashed on Saturday in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam where a massive search is on.
The Boeing 777-200 Flight MH370 with 227 passengers, including two infants and 12 crew members disappeared at 0240 local time (2310 IST) on Friday night. The list of passengers on board comprised 154 Chinese, 38 Malaysians, seven Indonesians, six Australians, five Indians, four Americans, three French, two New Zealanders, two Ukrainians, two Canadians, one Russian, one Italian, one Dutch and one Austrian.
Malaysia Airlines said the last point of contact with the plane was approximately 120 nautical miles east of Kota Baru in South China Sea. The airlines group chief executive officer Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said a search and rescue mission had been launched in the area after the aircraft lost contact. “We have contacted both the Malaysian and Vietnamese authorities as it is actually the borderline of Malaysian airspace and Vietnam control,” he said at a Press conference in Kuala lumpur.
Vietnamese air force planes spotted two large oil slicks close to where Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing, the first sign that the aircraft carrying 239 people had crashed. The air force planes were part of a multinational search operation launched after Flight MH370 fell off radar screens less than an hour after it took off from Kuala lumpur for Beijing. The oil slicks were spotted late on Saturday off the southern tip of Vietnam and were each between 10 kilometres and 15 kilometres long, the Vietnamese Government said in a statement. There was no confirmation that the slicks were related to the missing plane, but the statement said they were consistent with the kinds that would be produced by the two fuel tanks of a crashed jetliner.
Earlier, Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre (Youth) quoted Rear Admiral Ngo Van Phat, political commissar of the Fifth Naval Region of Vietnam, as saying that the plane had crashed. However, Malaysia’s Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he had “no information” or confirmation on the plane’s fate. “We are doing everything in our power to locate the plane,” he said.
According to the information obtained by the Indian Embassy in Beijing, the Indians on board were identified as Chetna Kolekar, Swanand Kolekar, Suresh Kolekar, Chandrika Sharma and Prahlad Shirsatha. Chandrika Sharma (51) is the executive secretary at the International Collective in Support of Fish-workers (ICSF), Chennai. She was on her way to Ulan Battor in Mongolia to participate in the regional conference of the Food and Agricultural Organisation, according to Sebastian Mathew, advisor, ICSF.
“She was to present a paper on the guidelines on the livelihood of fish workers and sustainable fisheries. Sharma was actively working to draw the attention of the FAO towards the issues faced by small scale fish workers,” said Mathew.One Indian-origin Canadian Muktesh Mukherjee was also on board. The pilot of the missing aircraft, identified as Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had 18,365 hours of experience and joined the airlines in 1981.
Relatives of the missing passengers were angry at the lack of information, with many having gathered for the Press conference in an east Beijing hotel. Cries and tears gripped the hotel conference room. Many relatives just sat on the floor. Many grief-stricken relatives even fainted and some were led to hotel rooms to take rest. Some said they would fly to Vietnam to look for their loved ones.