Navy scouring Bay of Bengal again for MH370 after GeoResonance claim

Bangladesh Navy has mounted a renewed search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Bay of Bengal after an Australian exploration company claimed to have traced its debris.

Two ships – BNS Bangabandhu and BNS Anusandhan – began scouring the sea from Tuesday night, Navy Director (Intelligence) Commodore Rashid Ali told bdnews24.com on Wednesday.

Geophysical survey company GeoResonance on Monday said it had spotted pieces of wreckage in the Bay of Bengal and that it should be investigated as potential debris from the Malaysian plane.

But the present search coordinators have dismissed the claim.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which is managing the multinational search, said it continued to believe that the plane had come down in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia.

Bangladesh Navy resumed search operation after the media ran reports on the GeoResonance claim.

The Navy’s two frigates and two maritime aircrafts had earlier scoured the Bay of Bengal, joining the multinational search, six days after the plane went missing.

But after a 12-day-long search, they returned empty handed.

Flight MH370, a Boeing 777, went off the radar while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Mar 8 with 239 people on board.

Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Britain and the United States are assisting Australia in conducting the most expensive search in aviation history.

GeoResonance official David Pope had said that the technology they used was originally designed to find nuclear warheads, submarines.

The company has surveyed over 2,000,000 square kilometres of the possible crash zone, using images obtained from satellites and aircrafts.

Scientists focused their efforts north of the flight’s last known location, using over 20 technologies to analyse the data including a nuclear reactor, Pope said.

He added they were “very excited” at finding what they believed to be the wreckage of a commercial airliner.

Another official of the survey company, Pavel Kursa, said they had identified chemical elements and materials including aluminium, titanium, copper and steel alloys that make up a Boeing 777.

The team sent an initial report to the authorities while the black box still had two weeks of battery power left.

They said they verified the findings by analysing images from the same area on Mar 5, three days before the Malaysian plane’s disappearance.

“The wreckage wasn’t there prior to the disappearance of MH370,” David Pope said.