Malaysia agrees to continue search for missing passenger plane

The Malaysian government says it has agreed in principle to restart the search for a passenger jet that disappeared a decade ago in one of aviation's biggest mysteries.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.

Efforts to find the bodies of the Boeing 777 have been going on for years and hundreds of families of those on board are still devastated by the tragedy.

On Friday, Malaysia's transport minister Anthony Loke said the cabinet had approved a $70m (£56m) deal with US exploration company Ocean Infinity to acquire the plane.

Under the “no find, no pay” plan, Ocean Infinity will only be paid once the damage has been discovered.

A 2018 search for Ocean Infinity under the same name ended without success after three months.

The $150m international effort ended in 2017 after two years of cleaning up much of the water.

Although the government has “accepted the proposal” of Ocean Infinity, Loke said that negotiations on the specific terms of the agreement are still ongoing and will be completed early next year.

The new search will cover an area of ​​15,000 sq km in the southern Indian Ocean.

“We hope that this time will be good,” said Loke, adding that finding this tragedy will bring closure to the families of those on board.

Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on the morning of 8 March 2014. It lost contact with air traffic control less than an hour after takeoff and radar indicated it had deviated from its planned flight path.

Investigators generally agree that the plane crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean – although it is unclear why it happened.

Pieces of debris, believed to be from the plane, washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean years after it disappeared.

There have been a number of theories about the disappearance of the plane, with speculation that the pilot deliberately crashed it, claiming that it was shot down by foreign forces.

A 2018 investigation into the plane's disappearance found that the plane's controls may have been deliberately manipulated to take it off course, but no conclusion was reached about who was piloting it. At the time the investigators said “the answer can only be found when the debris is found”.