Malaysian investigator of missing plane visits Madagascar

A Malaysian investigator of the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines plane in 2014 has travelled to Madagascar to pick up debris that possibly came from the missing plane and drifted across the Indian Ocean, a woman whose mother was on the aircraft said today.
The investigator will collect possible plane pieces found on Madagascar's shores by American wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson and others, said Grace Nathan, a Malaysian whose mother was among 239 people on Flight MH370 when it vanished.
Nathan and half a dozen other relatives of people lost on the Boeing 777 plane are currently in Madagascar to ask people to look for more debris that might provide clues about what happened to the aircraft, which is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean after deviating from its flight path from Malaysia to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

The group, which includes Chinese and a Frenchman who lost his wife and two of his three children, funded their trip and are frustrated by what they describe as a slow response by authorities to the discovery of debris around Africa.
Officials say several pieces of debris are confirmed as coming from the plane, or almost certainly came from MH370.
"The effort by the families to come to Madagascar promoted the Malaysian government to finally send someone after 6 months of waiting," Nathan said in an email to The Associated Press. The investigator has been invited to a press conference to be held later today by the family members, she said.

Officials have said they are committed to following all leads in the search, described as the biggest in aviation history. Malaysia, Australia and China are close to completing a deep-sea sonar search, so far fruitless, of 120,000 square kilometres off Australia's southwest coast in the Indian Ocean.
Officials say they will suspend operations if there is no new evidence that could help pinpoint the crash site, but relatives of the missing travellers believe the search should continue.