MH370 passengers' kins to search for debris in Madagascar

Relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 announced on Monday that they will travel to the island of Madagascar to carry out their own search for debris.

Voice 370, a group representing the relatives of the passengers and crew on board the flight, said in a statement that they would travel to the island nation on December 3 to hunt for aircraft debris, Efe news reported.

"All debris collected to date have been found off the east coast of Africa by the public. Despite these hugely important finds, there has been no systematic, organised search by any responsible party," the group said.

"This leaves the (relatives) no other choice except to take it upon ourselves to do something to find answers and closure."

The airplane disappeared on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board including crew and passengers.

Despite a multinational oceanic search for the aircraft conducted by investigators from Australia, Malaysia and China, among others, no bodies or black boxes from the plane have been found.

Pieces of debris have only periodically washed up on islands in the Indian Ocean and on the southeast coast of Africa, with the latest discovery being a piece of aircraft wing recovered from the island of Mauritius on October 7.

Australian authorities leading the underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean have searched more than 110,000 sq.km of the seafloor so far and expect to complete their search of the entire 120,000 sq.km search area by February 2017.

--IANS

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