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Teams have already searched a 120,000 square kilometre area. PA Images

Mystery unsolved: Private search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is called off

Ocean Infinity stood to make up to $70 million if the plane was found.

A PRIVATE HUNT for flight MH370 will end in the coming days, a search firm has said, about four years after the plane’s disappearance sparked one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.

The Malaysia Airlines jet vanished in March 2014 with 239 people — mostly from China — on board, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

No sign of the plane was found in a 120,000-square kilometre sea search zone and the Australian-led hunt, the largest in aviation history, was suspended in January last year.

After pressure from families, the former Malaysian government struck a deal with US exploration firm Ocean Infinity to restart the search in January on the condition it would only be paid if the Boeing 777 or its black boxes were found.

The firm stood to make up to $70 million if successful but did not find any sign of the airliner despite scouring the seabed with some of the world’s most high-tech search equipment.

The hunt was officially meant to end late April but was extended. However, the new government of Mahathir Mohamad, which came to power after a shock election win this month, announced last week the search was set to end.

Texas-based Ocean Infinity said in a statement Tuesday that “its current search for the wreckage of… Flight MH370 is shortly coming to an end”.

A spokesman added the hunt would end in the coming days, without giving a precise date.

The new hunt was in an area of about 25,000 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean, north of the previous search zone.

The ship conducting the hunt, Seabed Constructor, was a Norwegian research vessel carrying 65 crew, including two members of the Malaysian navy as the government’s representatives.

It scoured the waters for wreckage using eight autonomous drones equipped with sonars and cameras, and able to operate at depths up to 6,000 metres.

Only three confirmed fragments of MH370 have been found, all of them on western Indian Ocean shores, including a two-metre wing part known as a flaperon.

The jet’s disappearance stands as one of the most enduring aviation mysteries of all time and has spawned a host of theories, with some blaming a hijacking or even a terror plot.

© – AFP 2018

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    Mute Tim Henchin
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    Nov 16th 2011, 9:01 AM

    ………. what is the betting that not one of them will have a legitimate mandate. We live in a post-democratic age, it is disturbing to see how many accepted this.

    We have the man who fudged Greece’s books, so they could get in to the Euro, while he was the head of their banking system made leader. It is like having Sean Fitzpatrick rammed in as leader of this state by Europe.

    It will either go down in history as the start of a dark but temporary blot on European democratic history or else as a great day for Europe, written by our new technocratic masters in the future, the corporatization of the continent. There used to be a name for the merging of corporate power and State control in to one entity. A predecessor of this man invented it.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnTOiso08HM

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    Mute Uncle Mort
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    Nov 16th 2011, 9:40 AM

    Good link Tim,thanks for sharing it.
    The mention of the ‘intense talks’ by Monti begs the question as the what bribes were offered, by bribes I mean offers of position and power.

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