China is checking new satellite images of debris in the southern Indian Ocean which is suspected to be from the missing flight MH370, Malaysian officials have said.
Also Read: Families of MH370 Passengers Call Malaysian Officials 'Hijackers, Killers'
Malaysia's acting Transport Minister read out the news as he was handed a small piece of paper during his daily briefing, saying one element of debris was 22.5m by 13m.
He added that the Chinese government would give more details on Saturday.
China's CCTV has posted the following image of the newly discovered satellite images in Twitter:
China’s SASTIND has detected suspected a floating object 22m-long and 13m-wide in southern Indian Ocean.#MH370 pic.twitter.com/ngy1Wo12YL
— CCTVNEWS (@cctvnews) March 22, 2014
Surprise Transcript
Malaysia's Acting Transport Minister Hishammudin Hussen suddenly broke off the question and answer segment in Kuala Lumpur to announce: "The news that I just received is that the Chinese Ambassador received satellite image of floating objects in the southern corridor and they will be sending ships to verify."
He added: "Beijing is expected to make an announcement in a few hours."
Reuters Aurospace news also tweeted a picture of the piece of note handed over to the Malaysian Transport minister informing the Chinese Discovery of the images showing the flooting object:
This is note handed to Malaysia minister with Chinese discovery of floating object #MH370 pic.twitter.com/L3je2ZN0sD — ReutersAerospaceNews (@ReutersAero) March 22, 2014
China is one of the 26 nations involved in the search for flight MH370. More than half of those on board the plane were Chinese nationals.
Planes and vessels were already searching for debris in the southern Indian Ocean following earlier satellite images detected by Australia at some 2,500 (1,550) south-west of Perth.
The search in the Indian Ocean is being taken care by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA)
Six lanes were dispatched to the area on Saturday to search for the area, roughly the size of Benmark, BBC reports. Additional vessels supplied by China, Japan and the UK are also due to join the search efforts.
Adding to the increasing tensions, the Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said on Friday that the objects spotted on satellite images which sparked another round of massive international hunt in the remote southern Indian Ocean may have sunk after all.
MH370 Fact File
The wide-body jet, carrying 239 people onboard, was reported to have vanished from the civilian air-traffic control radar in the wee hours of Saturday, only about an hour into its journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
While the inability to solve the puzzle surrounding the bizarre disappearance of the plane has become a breeding ground for uncanny theories and explanations doing their rounds on the Internet, the event has prompted a massive international air and water search, which so far had not produced any tangible results. The new images are the closest the authorities have gone to locating the missing Malaysian plane.
