Malaysia's Minister of Defence and Acting Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein (L) listens to Director General of Civil Aviation Department (DCA) Azharuddin Abdul Rahman (R) during a media conference at a hotel near Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang on March 12, 2014. Malaysia said Thursday it dispatched an aircraft to investigate the site where Chinese satellites photographed three "suspected floating objects", near an area where several nations have been hunting for wreckage from a missing passenger plane. PHOTO/AFP
KUALA LUMPUR,
Malaysia said Thursday it dispatched an aircraft to investigate the site where Chinese satellites photographed three "suspected floating objects", near an area where several nations have been hunting for wreckage from a missing passenger plane.
"Bombardier has already been dispatched to investigate alleged claims of debris being found by Chinese satellite imagery," Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on his Twitter feed.
"Bombardier" apparently refers to the Canadian-made plane sent by Malaysia to the site.
The move came on the sixth day of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370, went missing early Saturday en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
China said late on Wednesday that its satellites had detected the objects on Sunday.
CONCRETE CLUES
Malaysian officials did not immediately respond to queries on whether or when the images had been shared with them.
But an army official in Vietnam, which has been helping in the search along with several other countries, said the Vietnamese were only informed of the objects on Thursday and were currently verifying the information.
The plane sent out Thursday was operated by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency.
A spokesman for Malaysia's search coordinators said separately that authorities would investigate the site where the objects were detected in the South China Sea.
"For sure, as mentioned, we will look at all areas especially the ones with concrete clues," he said in a text message.
The search for the missing flight has been expanded to an area encompassing nearly 27,000 nautical miles (over 90,000 square kilometres) -- roughly the size of Portugal -- and involves the militaries of multiple nations.
The hunt originally focused on an area off Vietnam's South China Sea coast, where the Boeing 777 last made contact Saturday on a journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
But nothing was found, and Malaysian authorities later expanded it to the Andaman Sea, north of Indonesia, hundreds of miles away, in the belief the plane might have mysteriously swerved westward off its original flight path.
China's state science and technology administration said the objects that were detected were spread across an area with a radius of 20 kilometres (12 miles).
Previous sightings of possible debris have proved to be merely various flotsam, and not from the jet.