MH370: Search teams ‘tantalizingly close’ to finding the wreckage of missing plane

As the perplexing hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 enters its fourth week, search teams believe they may be tantalizingly close to finding the wreckage. But for the relatives of the 239 passengers and crew, the failure to retrieve a single piece of debris to date is excruciating.

“Maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s not,” Sarah Bajc, the girlfriend of a US passenger, Philip Wood, told Associated Press in Beijing. “Maybe he’s still alive and we need to find him. Maybe he died within the first hour of the flight, and we don’t know. I mean, there’s absolutely no way for me to reconcile that in my heart.”

Visiting passengers’ relatives at a Malaysian hotel, the country’s transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, vowed that “no matter how remote the odds, we will pray, hope against hope, and continue to search for possible survivors” – a promise that observers warned could plant false hopes.

Hishammuddin also defended Malaysia’s handling of the disaster, which at times has been the subject of international criticism. He said: “No matter what has been thrown and labelled at us, history will judge us as a country that has been very responsible. We have corroborated any evidence that we have received. We have made sure that no stones are unturned.