Delegation fails to appease angry relatives
Print Edition
THE PowerPoint presentation wasn’t enough. The analysis by British investigators that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was lost at sea wasn’t enough.
The relatives of Chinese passengers gathered in a hotel banquet hall yesterday remained skeptical — and hostile.
“It’s all lies. Not a shred of truth!” said a man who identified himself as Mr Zhang from Harbin. He said afterward that he had wanted to pummel everyone giving the presentation — a delegation of Malaysian government and airline officials.
The officials came to Beijing a day after China demanded more details on what led to the missing plane being declared lost, and after relatives vented their anger in a public march to Malaysia’s embassy in Beijing to denounce that country’s handling of the disappearance.
Before an audience of several hundred relatives and their supporters, the Malaysian delegation read a report by investigators from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch concluding that the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean based on faint signals — or pings — from the plane to a British satellite.
During a nearly two-hour question-and-answer session, audience members asked how investigators could have reached conclusions about the direction and speed of the plane, but delegation members said they didn’t have the technical expertise to answer.
One woman retorted: “I thought this was a high-level team!” to applause from the crowd.
In Malaysia’s main city of Kuala Lumpur, meanwhile, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein urged calm and understanding on both sides.
“Time will heal emotions that are running high. We fully understand,” Hishammuddin told a news conference. “For the Chinese families, they must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones. There are so many other nations that have lost their loved ones.”
Though many observers criticized Malaysia’s initial response to the crisis, Chinese relatives — two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese — have been especially distrustful.
They have accused Malaysia of being slow to track the plane on March 8, the day of its disappearance, withholding information until it was too late to be of use in the search, and not telling the world all that they knew about what might have happened on board the fated Boeing 777 before it was lost.
China has expressed impatience over Malaysia’s slow release of information and its pace in the hunt for the plane, but at the same time has endorsed Malaysia’s leadership of the search while contributing the use of surveillance satellites, planes and ships.
Some of the Chinese relatives may have an especially hard time dealing with the loss of loved ones because of China’s one-child policy, which means an entire family generation, or even two, can be wiped out in a single incident, China expert Bo Zhiyue of the University of Singapore said.
As the search continued in the Indian Ocean, where possible debris from the plane has been spotted, one man whose brother was on the flight said he wasn’t sure if he wanted the plane to be found.
“We are very conflicted,” Wang Chunjiang said.
“We want to know the truth, but we are afraid of having the debris found. If they find debris, then our last hope would be dashed.”
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