Flight 370 search ends, mystery staying

FILE - In this July 29, 2015, file photo, French police officers carry a piece of debris, the first trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in Saint-Andre, Reunion Island.
FILE - In this July 29, 2015, file photo, French police officers carry a piece of debris, the first trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in Saint-Andre, Reunion Island.

BANGKOK -- For two years and more, it has been a lost ship, a metal container carrying 239 people that simply disappeared one late night never to be seen again. And now, the search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 likely will become a thing of memory, too.

With Friday's announcement that the meticulous ocean search for the missing jetliner will be suspended, one of this decade's unanswered questions is headed toward becoming, in effect, a cold case.

"I am not surprised it's coming to an end without any answers," Tony Wong, a businessman in Kuala Lumpur, said Monday.

"People are slowly forgetting the incident," he said. "No one will ever know the truth."

The truth may be out there. The problem is, you have to know where to look. And that's been precisely the problem all along.

The Boeing 777-200ER vanished on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Investigators believed it turned back west and then south before dropping into the Indian Ocean west of Australia, where the search has been concentrated. The Malaysian government has concluded that it was deliberately steered off course. Conspiracy theories, unsurprisingly, still abound: Was it blown up? Steered into the sea? Diverted to a remote airstrip somewhere?

For a long stretch, it seemed the world's biggest loose end -- a global obsession for weeks, a niggling unsolved riddle for years. And behind it were the people lost and the families they left behind, which expected maximum effort and, to hear many relatives tell it, a successful resolution.

They were not happy at the news that the search was being suspended. To varying degrees, they have accused investigators and searchers and the governments overseeing them of disingenuousness, incompetence and nefarious political agendas.

In China, relatives have roundly denounced the decision. They still don't seem ready to think about the finality of it all.

"They are actually just playing with words," Hu Xiulan, the mother of a Flight 370 passenger, said Monday. "'Suspension' means termination to us. We strongly demand a re-investigation into how the plane went missing, and there is no excuse for the suspension of the search."

"It's all a big fabrication, a big cover-up," said Sakinab Shah, the eldest sister of senior pilot Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah. "Things just don't add up."

The decision to suspend the search, which has endured through damaged equipment and punishing weather, was made jointly by the three countries conducting the operation: Malaysia, Australia and China, which lost the most people in the aircraft's disappearance. Together, they already have spent $135 million searching a 46,300-square-mile area.

The governments were delicate in their language Friday -- they did not say outright that they were ending the search. But there is a general sense that it is unlikely to continue unless specific new evidence is found to suggest a particular location. And the search in its current incarnation will not end immediately; it could last into the winter months, officials have said.

A Section on 07/26/2016

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