Debris washed up on Australian beach not from MH370

PERTH: The Australian Transport Safety Bureau ruled out Thursday any link between material found on a beach in southwestern Australia and the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

Debris described as "unidentified material" was found Wednesday on a beach near Augusta, more than 300 kilometres (180 miles) south of Perth, by a member of the public and handed to police.

The ATSB decided to examine photographs of the material to determine whether it was linked to the search for the missing Boeing 777.

Photographs were also provided to the Malaysian investigation team.

However ATSB chief commissioner Martin Dolan scotched any hope of a breakthrough.

"We´ve carefully examined detailed photographs that were taken for us by the police, and we´re satisfied that it´s not a lead in terms of the search for MH370," Dolan told ABC radio.

"We want to pursue every possible lead that will help us find MH370 but sadly this is one that isn´t going to help that search," he said.

"We do encourage everyone who thinks they have viable leads in relation to the aircraft to contact the ATSB."

Dolan had Wednesday night declared the material, apparently sheet metal with rivets, "sufficiently interesting for us to take a look at the photographs".

However he had added a note of caution. "The more we look at it, the less excited we get."

As frustrations grow at the failure to find any trace of MH370, Australia´s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC)said Thursday an underwater search with an unmanned mini-sub was almost finished.

"Bluefin-21 has now completed more than 90 percent of the focused underwater search area. "No contacts of interest have been found to date," the statement said.

The sonar Bluefin device was currently completing its 12th mission, JACC said, in an area defined as a circle of 10-kilometre (six-mile) radius around a signal detected on April 8.If the completed Bluefin hunt draws a blank officials say the operation will move to a new phase and likely need bigger equipment.

The airliner with 239 people aboard was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 when it mysteriously diverted. It is thought to have crashed into the remote Indian Ocean off Western Australia.

A surface search involving a fleet of ships and military aircraft would depend on the weather on Thursday, JACC said with the forecast for heavy rain and low cloud as Tropical Cyclone Jack moves south.

The visual hunt covers an area totalling about 49,567 square kilometres (19,100 square miles) some 1,584 kilometres northwest of Perth. (AFP)

MH370: Object found on Australian coast not from missing plane

AP In this map provided on Wednesday by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, details are presented in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. A metal object found on a beach in Western Australia does not belong to the missing Malaysian jet, authorities said on Thursday

A metal object found on a beach in Western Australia does not belong to a Malaysian jet that vanished nearly seven weeks ago, authorities said on Thursday as a robotic mini-submarine scouring the Indian Ocean seabed scanned more than 90 per cent of the focused search area.

Detailed pictures of the object were enough to convince investigators that it wasn’t a lead in the search for the plane, the Australian agency leading the search for the aircraft said.

“We’ve carefully examined detailed photographs that were taken for us by the police, and we’re satisfied that it’s not a lead in terms of the search for MH370.” Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) spokesman Martin Dolan said.

Australia’s joint agency co-ordination centre announced on Wednesday that police had taken possession of an object 10km from the town of Augusta. Malaysian officials were provided with photographs of the object.

The find in Western Australia came shortly after the suspension of the air and underwater search for the plane due to poor weather conditions.

Possible promising leads have turned out to be false alarms for weeks in the lengthy search for the Boeing 777-200 which disappeared mid-flight on March 8 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. One major challenge that is complicated the search is that the ocean is full of garbage.

Other objects spotted in the Indian Ocean earlier turned out to be trash, jellyfish and fishing gear.

Inclement weather and ex-tropical cyclone Jack, which is moving south across the Indian ocean, may delay the resumption of the search today.

“Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 49,567 square kilometres. The centre of the search area lies approximately 1,584 kilometres north west of Perth,” according to Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC).

The focused underwater search area to locate the black box is defined as a circle of 10km radius where four acoustic signals were detected.

The remote submersible Bluefin-21 is conducting an underwater search mission, having scoured 90 per cent of the focused area of interest.

Australia indicated the approach to the search might be revised with more powerful underwater vehicles if Bluefin’s search yields no results. It is mulling deploying a more powerful system that tracked the Titanic 29 years ago to locate the wreckage of the plane.

The Malaysia Airlines flight went missing more than a month ago, but search officials are yet to find anything that would confirm the fate of the plane.

MH370: Object found on Australian coast not from missing plane

AP In this map provided on Wednesday by the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, details are presented in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean. A metal object found on a beach in Western Australia does not belong to the missing Malaysian jet, authorities said on Thursday

A metal object found on a beach in Western Australia does not belong to a Malaysian jet that vanished nearly seven weeks ago, authorities said on Thursday as a robotic mini-submarine scouring the Indian Ocean seabed scanned more than 90 per cent of the focused search area.

Detailed pictures of the object were enough to convince investigators that it wasn’t a lead in the search for the plane, the Australian agency leading the search for the aircraft said.

“We’ve carefully examined detailed photographs that were taken for us by the police, and we’re satisfied that it’s not a lead in terms of the search for MH370.” Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) spokesman Martin Dolan said.

Australia’s joint agency co-ordination centre announced on Wednesday that police had taken possession of an object 10km from the town of Augusta. Malaysian officials were provided with photographs of the object.

The find in Western Australia came shortly after the suspension of the air and underwater search for the plane due to poor weather conditions.

Possible promising leads have turned out to be false alarms for weeks in the lengthy search for the Boeing 777-200 which disappeared mid-flight on March 8 with 239 people, including five Indians, aboard. One major challenge that is complicated the search is that the ocean is full of garbage.

Other objects spotted in the Indian Ocean earlier turned out to be trash, jellyfish and fishing gear.

Inclement weather and ex-tropical cyclone Jack, which is moving south across the Indian ocean, may delay the resumption of the search today.

“Today the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has planned a visual search area totalling approximately 49,567 square kilometres. The centre of the search area lies approximately 1,584 kilometres north west of Perth,” according to Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC).

The focused underwater search area to locate the black box is defined as a circle of 10km radius where four acoustic signals were detected.

The remote submersible Bluefin-21 is conducting an underwater search mission, having scoured 90 per cent of the focused area of interest.

Australia indicated the approach to the search might be revised with more powerful underwater vehicles if Bluefin’s search yields no results. It is mulling deploying a more powerful system that tracked the Titanic 29 years ago to locate the wreckage of the plane.

The Malaysia Airlines flight went missing more than a month ago, but search officials are yet to find anything that would confirm the fate of the plane.

Australian PM 'confident' over MH370 black box signals

 

AP In this April 3, 2014 photo, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaks as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, left, looks on during a breakfast with crew members from different countries involved in the search for wreckage and debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in Perth, Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Friday he was “confident” that the latest signals picked up by search vessels were from the black box on board missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

Speaking to reporters after arriving in Shanghai on an official visit, Mr. Abbott said the search area had been narrowed down, indicating that vessels were close to a breakthrough after more than a month of searching for the Boeing 777, which disappeared around one hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of March 8. Bound for Beijing, the plane had 239 people on board, including five Indians, 154 Chinese, and 38 Malaysian nationals.

“We have very much narrowed down the search area and we are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370,” the Australian Prime Minister told reporters in Shanghai, according to Reuters.

Recovering the black box, which records flight data, is crucial to discovering what went tragically wrong on board MH370, which disappeared from air traffic radars somewhere over the Gulf of Thailand.

Malaysian officials said investigations had led them to believe that on-board transmitters had been manually disconnected and the plane had been “deliberately” diverted wide off-course, before tracking far south to the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia and plunging into some of the world's most remote waters.

Rescuers are facing a race against time to recover the black box, which may be several thousand feet under water, on the ocean bed. As batteries in the black box, which is also equipped with underwater beacons, usually last for around 30 days, rescuers are already on borrowed time, experts said.

Mr. Abbott's comments on Friday are only the latest in a long-winding search effort that has already seen many false leads. The twists and turns have brought anguish to relatives, who have been through an unimaginably traumatic few weeks in waiting for news of their loved ones.

Here in Beijing, many relatives of the 154 Chinese nationals, who still wait at a hotel for news, have held on to hope - hope which has been fast-diminishing, but would not be extinguished, they said, until there was some concrete evidence about the fate of the aircraft, whether through the recovery of the black box or debris.

With more than 100 aircraft and vessels at one point scouring the waters of the Indian Ocean in recent weeks, the narrowing of the search area to a smaller 600 square kilometre has led to suggestions that a breakthrough may finally be at hand.

Greg Waldron, an aviation expert at Flight Global, said the latest “pings” detected were consistent with that from flight recorders. “The news seems to be very positive,” he told China's State broadcaster CCTV on Friday, speaking shortly after Mr. Abbott's comments. “This is probably the best lead we have had in the search for

Australian PM 'confident' over MH370 black box signals

AP In this April 3, 2014 photo, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaks as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, left, looks on during a breakfast with crew members from different countries involved in the search for wreckage and debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in Perth, Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Friday he was “confident” that the latest signals picked up by search vessels were from the black box on board missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

Speaking to reporters after arriving in Shanghai on an official visit, Mr. Abbott said the search area had been narrowed down, indicating that vessels were close to a breakthrough after more than a month of searching for the Boeing 777, which disappeared around one hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of March 8. Bound for Beijing, the plane had 239 people on board, including five Indians, 154 Chinese, and 38 Malaysian nationals.

“We have very much narrowed down the search area and we are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370,” the Australian Prime Minister told reporters in Shanghai, according to Reuters.

Recovering the black box, which records flight data, is crucial to discovering what went tragically wrong on board MH370, which disappeared from air traffic radars somewhere over the Gulf of Thailand.

Malaysian officials said investigations had led them to believe that on-board transmitters had been manually disconnected and the plane had been “deliberately” diverted wide off-course, before tracking far south to the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia and plunging into some of the world's most remote waters.

Rescuers are facing a race against time to recover the black box, which may be several thousand feet under water, on the ocean bed. As batteries in the black box, which is also equipped with underwater beacons, usually last for around 30 days, rescuers are already on borrowed time, experts said.

Mr. Abbott's comments on Friday are only the latest in a long-winding search effort that has already seen many false leads. The twists and turns have brought anguish to relatives, who have been through an unimaginably traumatic few weeks in waiting for news of their loved ones.

Here in Beijing, many relatives of the 154 Chinese nationals, who still wait at a hotel for news, have held on to hope - hope which has been fast-diminishing, but would not be extinguished, they said, until there was some concrete evidence about the fate of the aircraft, whether through the recovery of the black box or debris.

With more than 100 aircraft and vessels at one point scouring the waters of the Indian Ocean in recent weeks, the narrowing of the search area to a smaller 600 square kilometre has led to suggestions that a breakthrough may finally be at hand.

Greg Waldron, an aviation expert at Flight Global, said the latest “pings” detected were consistent with that from flight recorders. “The news seems to be very positive,” he told China's State broadcaster CCTV on Friday, speaking shortly after Mr. Abbott's comments. “This is probably the best lead we have had in the search for quite a while”.

Second Australian gallery removes stolen Indian artefact from display

A second Australian art gallery has removed from display a centuries-old statue following allegations the artefact was stolen from an ancient site in India and sold by a tainted Indian art dealer.

The decision by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (NSW) follows a similar move by Canberra-based National Gallery of Australia that on Monday, pulled from display the bronze $5.6-million statue, purchased in 2008 from New York art and antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor.

The stone Ardhanrishvara idol was sold to the NSW Art Gallery at a price of over $300,000 from Kapoors in 2004.

Both the statues — allegedly stolen and sold by Kapoor, who is on trial in Chennai for running antiquities smuggling — were removed from display following written requests from Indian government to return them back.

“The request for the return of the Ardhanariswara Idol is now a matter for the Australian Government through the Ministry for the Arts in the Attorney-General’s Department,” the Art Gallery of NSW said in a statement.

The gallery said the item has been removed and that it will continue to cooperate fully with the Australian government and relevant authorities towards a resolution.

Reacting to the issue, Chairman AusHeritage and CEO India Vision Institute Vinod Daniel said the two galleries should return the statues to India calling it “the appropriate thing to do.”

“The appropriate thing for these galleries to do is to repatriate these cultural objects back to India, especially for objects such as the ‘Dancing Shiva’ which would have been used for worship in Tamil Nadu,” he said.

Daniel said the Australian Museum in 2000 had sent 33 three objects back to the Government Museum in Chennai.

Attorney-General’s Department is currently processing the Indian government’s request of returning the allegedly stolen artefacts.