The Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing, China, ruled on Monday that Malaysia Airlines must pay about 2.9 million yuan, or about $410,000, to eight families of passengers of Malaysia Airlines 370 (MH370), a commercial airliner that went missing in March 2014 and has yet to be found.
The ruling mandates that the airline pay over $3 million total and is part of a much broader set of cases in China filed by the relatives of those onboard the missing plane. MH370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 people, over two thirds of them Chinese nationals. It was expected to land in Beijing but disappeared from radar screens shortly after departure and was never seen again.
Investigators have in the past decade found small bits of debris they have claimed could be part of the missing plane, such as the flaperon found in the western Indian Ocean, but authorities do not yet know the final resting place of the aircraft. Malaysian authorities have also not reached a conclusion regarding what happened to cause the plane to disappear, though theories ranging from technical malfunction to a suicidal pilot abound.
The news follows the announcement last week that, over a decade later, the Malaysian government will resume a search effort to find the missing plane. Led by the research firm Ocean Infinity, the search is expected to resume on December 30, weather permitting, and the firm has agreed not to charge Malaysian taxpayers unless it makes a meaningful discovery.
According to the Chinese state news outlet Xinhua, the Beijing court’s ruling in favor of the families resolves eight of 78 lawsuits involving passengers on MH370, involving 75 missing people. An estimated 47 of these cases are no longer active as the families settled with the airline out of court, but the Chinese Communist Party’s legal system is still processing 23 other cases. Reports indicated that the compensation in the eight cases resolved this week was meant as redress for emotional distress and financial losses such as funeral costs; the Chinese government has legally ruled the passengers of the aircraft dead despite the absence of proof that they died on the flight, allowing for legal procedures based on wrongful death laws.
The international nature of the plane’s disappearance, and the failure of the Malaysian government under three successful prime ministers to solve the mystery, has plagued Kuala Lumpur as a significant foreign policy issue, notable given that Malaysia and China otherwise enjoy relatively friendly relations. In 2015, shortly after the alleged discovery of MH370’s flaperon in 2015, a group of 50 loved ones of the passengers stormed the Malaysian embassy in Beijing demanding answers. The relatives, insisting they did not trust the Malaysian government to tell the truth about the discovery, were also demanding flights to Reunion, the French African island off of whose waters the flaperon was reportedly found.
“These findings are fake. This is a conspiracy. Everything is fake,” Dai Shuqin, whose sister was on the flight, told NBC News at the time.
China is a communist state that aggressively and violently suppresses dissent; the government allowing such a public assembly without punishing or silencing the passengers’ loved ones was seen at the time as an indication of the Chinese government’s own impatience with the slow and unfruitful search for the plane.
A decade after that protest, the search is expected to soon continue. Ocean Infinity, the company that will be using its search technology to find the plane, returns to the project after conducting a search on behalf of the affected governments between January and May 2018. It has reportedly been developing a plan to return to the search since 2023 without successfully convincing the government to try again. Radar tracking and flight plan mapping suggested that the plane disappeared deep into the heart of the Indian Ocean, complicating the search as the suspected area where the plane fell is miles away from any reliable land base for the research project.
Relatives of those on the plane in China welcomed the news that the investigation would continue this month, though they lamented that Ocean Infinity had been contracted for a set period of time, after which it would end the search regardless of discovery.
“We hope the search on reward can be changed into an open and long-term one, with no fixed end date,” Jiang Hui, who lost his mother to the mystery, wrote on social media in early December, when the news of the new search was revealed. “The families would be willing to participate in such a reward search.”
Another Chinese relative of the passengers, Li Eryou, attacked the Malaysian government in remarks this month as collected by the South China Morning Post.
“When the 2018 safety report said investigators could not be sure of the real reason that MH370 went missing, it was an insult for all the families and those who were following this,” he lamented. The government at the time was in the hands of Nijab Razak, who has since left the office in disgrace amid a corruption scandal.
The current Malaysian prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was in prison at the time of MH370’s disappearance on charges of “sodomy.” The Nijab Razak government had identified the pilot of the plane, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, as an alleged “fanatical” Anwar Ibrahim fan who regularly denounced his status as that of a political prisoner.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Read the full article here