[if gte mso 9]>
<![endif]
The Chinese government demanded Tuesday that Malaysia turn over the satellite data it used to conclude that a missing airliner was lost somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.
Two-third of the passengers aboard the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that vanished into thin air 18-days-ago were from China.
“We demand the Malaysian side to make clear the specific basis on which they come to this judgment,” Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Hangsheng told Malaysia’s ambassador to Beijing.
Out on the streets, angry relatives of the missing Chinese wearing white T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s pray fo MH370” pelted the Malaysian Embassy with plastic bottles and tried to storm the gates in protest while chanting “Liars!” and “Malaysia, return our relatives!”
“Tell the truth!” they shouted as Chinese police made no attempt to break up the demonstration.
The Chinese cops intervened only when some of the protesters tried to approach the reporters and several scuffles broke out.
After presenting a formal letter of protest to the Malaysian Embassy, the angry kin boarded waiting buses and headed back to the hotel near Beijing’s airport that has been their home ever since the plane went missing March 8.
The Chinese demand — and the angry demonstration — was met with silence from Malaysia’s leaders in Kuala Lumpur.
They have been criticized almost from the start for giving conflicting statements about what happened and they further infuriated the Chinese on Monday by callously breaking the news to the relatives that all hope of finding survivors was lost — by text message.
Malaysian Airlines honcho Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said they were just trying to make sure “the families heard the tragic news before the world did.”
But the Chinese, who don’t trust their own communist leaders, were putting little stock in what Malaysia’s rulers were saying.
“I want the truth, and I believe they have been hiding some information from us,” Wang Zhen, whose parents were aboard the missing plane, told the Associated Press earlier by telephone. “It remains an enigma as to what happened after the plane turned around. What happened when the plane continued to fly?”
Meanwhile in Chicago, where Boeing is based, the father of one of the missing passengers, Firman Chandra Siregar, filed legal papers — the first step towards a lawsuit — demanding information about the training of the crew and the condition of the plane.
But the answer to a mystery that has transfixed much of the world was somewhere out there in an Alaska-sized stretch of water about 1,500 miles southwest of Australia.
“We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack — we’re still trying to define where the haystack is,” Australia’s deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters gathered at a military base in Perth.
Also, gale-force winds and heavy rain forced stymied the searchers trying to reach the area where debris that could be part of the missing Boeing 777 was spotted in the water by Australian and Chinese search planes.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search would take a long time and “we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges.”
It was Razak who touched off the explosion of emotion when he announced that the missing plane had gone down in a desolate part of the Indian Ocean and that there were likely no survivors.
The embattled Malaysian leader made the pronouncement after British aviation officials were able to narrow down the search area using “a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort.”
Razak was referring to an analysis of signals the plane sent every hour to a satellite belonging to Inmarsat, a British company, even after other communication systems on the jetliner shut down for reasons still unknown.
This is how the Brits were able to determine that the plane backtracked over Malaysia and then traveled in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean.
And this is the information the Chinese want to get their hands on.
What the analysis does not explain is why the plane was heading in the wrong direction.
Officials have not ruled out the possibility that the plane was hijacked by terrorists. Nor have they ruled out the possibility that the pilots deliberately down the plane.
“We do not know why. We do not know how. We do not know how the terrible tragedy happened,” the airline’s chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said.
All they can be sure of, Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohammed Nor Mohammed Yusof said, is that the plane crashed in the ocean.
“This by the evidence given to us, and by rational deduction, we could only arrive at that conclusion: That is, for Malaysia Airlines to declare that it has lost its plane, and by extension, the people in the plane,” he said.
With News Wire Services
