Indonesia Navy Joins Search for MH370

Jakarta Globe, Mar 09, 2014

Indonesian Navy warships. (JG Photo)

Jakarta. Five Indonesian warships and a helicopter have joined the search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which went missing in the early hours of Saturday morning over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board, Indonesian state media reported on Sunday.

“I’ve communicated with the commander of the Malaysian Navy, Admiral Tan Sri Abdul Aziz,” Indonesian Navy commander Admiral Marsetio told the state-run Antara news agency in Jakarta on Sunday. “They asked us to help look for the Malaysian Airlines aircraft that has been declared missing.”

Marsetio said the five warships and the helicopter would comb waters around the Malacca Strait to search for any possible wreckage of the plane. Air safety specialists have been widely quoted in the media as saying the sudden loss of contact indicated something sudden happened to the aircraft, and the focus of the search on Sunday remained in the Gulf of Thailand around the plane’s last known location.

The Boeing 777-200 aircraft vanished from radar screens on early Saturday morning, about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.

Calls to the TNI were not returned by Sunday afternoon.

The number of Indonesian nationals traveling on the plane was revised down from 12 to seven on Saturday after airline staff confused the country codes of India and Indonesia.

The passenger manifest lists the Indonesian travelers as Firman Siregar, 25; Ferryindra Suadaya, 42; Herryindra Suadaya, 35; Lo Sugianto, 42; Indrasuria Tanurisam, 57; Vinny Chynthyatio, 47 and Willy Surijanto Wang, 53.

“Family members of the MH370 passengers from Beijing who wish to travel will be flown in stages to Kuala Lumpur on the available flights,” MAS chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said. ” We are also communicating with the families from other nations to similarly arrange for their travel to Kuala Lumpur.”

While the airline continued to try and communicate with the families of those on board, the Malaysian navy said it was investigating whether the plane may have attempted to turn back immediately before contact was lost.

“There is a distinct possibility the airplane did a turn-back, deviating from the course,” Daud said. “One of the possibilities is that it was returning to Kuala Lumpur.”

Malaysian authorities said they were in possession of CCTV footage of two men confirmed to have checked in together and traveled on stolen passports.

Police and intelligence services in Malaysia had ruled nothing out on Sunday, while the UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph said it had confirmed that the men traveling as Austrian Christian Kozel and Italian Luigi Maraldi had tickets to fly on from Beijing to Amsterdam on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

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