World

PERTH, Australia — Ships searching the vast Indian Ocean for a Malaysian airliner have detected three separate underwater signals, and more ships and planes were diverted Sunday to investigate whether they could have come from its “black box”.

Angus Houston, head of the Australian search mission, said the detections were being taken “very seriously” as time ticked down on the battery life of the black box’s tracking beacons.

He said China’s Haixun 01 has twice detected an underwater signal on a frequency used for the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders — once for 90 seconds on Saturday and another more fleeting “ping” on Friday a short distance away.

A third “ping” was also being scrutinised, 300 nautical miles away in the Indian Ocean.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard vanished on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

“This is an important and encouraging lead but one which I urge you to continue to treat carefully,” Houston told reporters.

“We are working in a very big ocean and within a very large search area.”

“Speculation and unconfirmed reports can see the loved ones of the passengers put through terrible stress, and I don’t want to put them under any further emotional distress at this very difficult time.”

Britain’s HMS Echo and the Australian ship Ocean Shield — both equipped with black box locators — and Australian air force planes were being diverted to the area to help discount or confirm the Chinese signals, Houston said.

Ocean Shield was also investigating the signal it detected on Sunday in its current location, about 300 nautical miles north of Haixun 01, in waters far off Australia’s west coast.

Houston said the Chinese finding was more promising.

“I think the fact that we’ve had two detections, two acoustic events in that location, provides some promise which requires a full investigation,” he said.

Time running out 

The hunt for the jet was refocused on the southern end of the search zone Sunday after corrected satellite data showed it was more likely the plane entered the water there.

Houston said the Haixun 01 was already operating in that more southerly zone.

Some analysts greeted the acoustic detections with optimism, saying a 37.5kHz signal can only be transmitted by an emergency beacon. But others were sceptical and said it was vital to find supporting evidence.

Houston said Haixun 01 was in waters about 4.5 kilometres deep, meaning “any recovery operation is going to be incredibly challenging and very demanding, and will take a long period of time” if the plane is found there.

Houston said time was critical.

“This is Day 30 of the search and the advertised time for the life of the batteries in the beacon is 30 days. Sometimes they last for several days beyond that — say eight to 10 days beyond that — but we’re running out of time in terms of the battery life of the emergency locator beacons.”

Up to 10 military planes, two civil aircraft and 13 ships were scouring the remote waters on Sunday, concentrating on about 216,000 square kilometres of the Indian Ocean around 2,000 kilometres northwest of Perth.

Houston insisted that China was “sharing everything that’s relevant to this search” with the lead authority and sidestepped questions over the Haixun 01’s location far from the other lead vessels in the search.

“China has seven ships out there, that’s by far the largest fleet of ships out there. I think we should be focusing on the positives,” he said.

Hope, scepticism over signal 

In Kuala Lumpur more than 2,000 people including relatives held an emotional mass prayer Sunday for the safety of the passengers.

Orange-robed Buddhist monks chanted mantras for almost two hours, before about two dozen tearful relatives left the event.

Some family members still cling to hope in the absence of wreckage from the plane and are desperate for leads.

But Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor of Flightglobal publication, based in Singapore, said he was sceptical that the Chinese ship had picked up a pulse.

“There have been a lot of false leads in this story and we need to be extremely cautious with any information that comes,” he told AFP.

“I am very sceptical that the Chinese have found something so soon, given the vastness of the search area.”

Ravi Madavaram, an aviation analyst with Frost & Sullivan based in Kuala Lumpur, said most beacons used in the maritime and aviation industry had the same frequency and the ping could “likely” be from flight MH370.

“But the Chinese have not said exactly where the ‘ping’ is originating and where they detected it,” he said.

“The Chinese had previously given false alarms, so we need to verify from others before we can confirm that we have a ping.”

Malaysian authorities believe satellite readings indicate MH370 crashed in the Indian Ocean after veering dramatically off course for reasons that remain unknown.

A criminal probe has focused on the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or psychological problems among passengers or crew, but there is no evidence yet to support any of the theories.

KABUL — Afghans celebrated a largely peaceful election on Saturday, as turnout exceeded predictions despite Taliban threats to disrupt the vote to choose President Hamid Karzai's successor.

Long queues of voters waited throughout the day outside many of the 6,400 polling centres before the prolonged process of counting began, with preliminary results not due until April 24.

Whoever emerges victorious must lead the fight against the Taliban without the help of US-led combat troops, and also strengthen an economy reliant on declining aid money.

The country faces a politically-testing few months as it undergoes its first democratic transfer of power, and many Afghans fear a repeat of the fraud scandals that marred the last presidential election in 2009.

If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round a run-off is scheduled for late May.

There were no major terror attacks during polling, and organisers hailed the election a major success, despite complaints that a shortages of ballot papers had denied some citizens to right to vote.

"Today, I can claim that the enemies of Afghanistan have failed in their plan to disrupt the election process," Interior Minister Omar Daudzai told reporters.

"People's participation in the election was unprecedented and it was a huge success."

The final turnout could exceed seven million, the head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, said, though this was a preliminary estimate and may change. Initial predictions in 2009 proved inaccurate.

Around 13.5 million people were eligible to vote, putting the estimated turnout above 50 per cent — a significant increase on 2009, when only around a third of voters cast ballots.

Open race

There was no clear favourite among the front-runners to succeed Karzai — former foreign minister Zalmai Rassoul, Abdullah Abdullah, who was runner-up in the 2009 election, and former World Bank academic Ashraf Ghani.

The open nature of the race coupled with a massive security operation to thwart Taliban attacks may have contributed to the high turnout.

The Taliban had urged their fighters to target polling staff, voters and security forces, but there were no major attacks reported during the day.

In Kabul, hit by a series of deadly attacks during the election campaign, hundreds of people lined up outside polling centres to vote despite heavy rain and the insurgents’ promise of violence.

“I’m not afraid of Taliban threats, we will die one day anyway. I want my vote to be a slap in the face of the Taliban,” housewife Laila Neyazi, 48, told AFP.

One blast in Logar province, south of Kabul, killed one person and wounded two, according to Mohammad Agha district chief Abdul Hameed Hamid.

Interior Minister Daudzai said four civilians, nine police and seven soldiers had been killed in violence in the past 24 hours, and added that many attacks had been foiled, without giving further details.

Attacks or fear of violence had forced more than 200 of a total 6,423 voting centres to remain closed.

The day before the poll, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus was shot dead by a police commander in eastern Khost province.

She was the third journalist working for international media to be killed during the election campaign, after Swedish journalist Nils Horner and Sardar Ahmad of Agence France-Presse.

Challenging future 

Afghans have taken over responsibility for security from US-led forces, and this year the last of the NATO coalition’s 51,000 combat troops will pull out, leaving local forces to battle the resilient Taliban insurgency without their help.

In the western city of Herat, a queue of several hundred people waited to vote at one polling station, while in Jalalabad in the east, voters stood patiently outside a mosque.

Voters also lined up in Kandahar city, the southern heartland of the Taliban, with some women among the crowd in contrast to the 2009 election, when turnout was very low due to poor security.

The country’s third presidential election brings an end to 13 years of rule by Karzai, who has held power since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

Massive fraud and widespread violence marred Karzai’s re-election in 2009, and a disputed result this time would add to the challenges facing the new president.

The election may offer a chance for Afghanistan to improve relations with the United States, its principal donor, after the mercurial Karzai years.

Relations fell to a new low late last year when Karzai refused to sign a security agreement that would allow the US to keep around 10,000 troops in Afghanistan to train local forces and hunt Al Qaeda.

KIEV — Ukraine on Saturday rejected Russia’s latest gas price hike and threatened to take its energy-rich neighbour to arbitration court over a dispute that could imperil deliveries to western Europe.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Russia’s two rate increases in three days were a form of “economic aggression” aimed at punishing Ukraine’s new leaders for overthrowing a Moscow-backed regime last month.

Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom this week raised the price of Ukrainian gas by 81 percent -- to $485.50 (354.30 euros) from $268.50 for 1,000 cubic metres -- requiring the ex-Soviet state to pay the highest rate of any of its European clients.

The decision threatens to further fan a furious diplomatic row over Ukraine’s future between Moscow and the West that has left Kremlin insiders facing sanctions and more diplomatic isolation than at any stage since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Political pressure is unacceptable. And we do not accept the price of $500 (per 1,000 cubic metres of gas),” Yatsenyuk told a cabinet meeting called to get a handle on the economic crisis that threatens to escalate tensions in the culturally splintered nation of 46 million.

“Russia was unable to seize Ukraine by means of military aggression. Now, they are implementing plans to seize Ukraine through economic aggression.”

Yatsenyuk said Ukraine was ready to continue purchasing Russian gas at the old rate of $268.50 because this was “an acceptable price”.

But he added that Ukraine must prepare for the possibility that “Russia will either limit or halt deliveries of gas to Ukraine” in the coming weeks or months.

Gazprom’s western European clients saw their deliveries limited in 2006 and 2010 when the gas giant -- long accused of raising the rates of neighbours who seek closer ties to the West -- halted supplies to Ukraine due to disagreements over price.

The state gas company supplies about a third of EU nations’ demand despite efforts by Brussels to limit energy dependence on Russia amid its crackdown on domestic dissent and increasingly militant foreign stance.

Nearly 40 percent of that gas flows through Ukraine while the remainder travels along the Nord Stream undersea pipeline to Germany and another link through Belarus and Poland.

Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuriy Prodan said Kiev was ready to take Gazprom to arbitration court in Stockholm if Moscow refused to negotiate over a lower price.

“If we fail to agree, we are going to go to arbitration court, as the current contract allows us to do,” Prodan warned.

The budding gas war adds another layer of concern to a crisis that has seen Russia mass tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border after annexing its Black Sea peninsula of Crimea last month.

The Unites States has responded by boosting NATO’s defence of eastern European nations and trying to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin on the world stage.

US Vice President Joe Biden vowed on Friday to work with Ukraine and other allies to prevent Russia from using energy as a “political weapon”.

And both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Saturday that Europe -- once divided in the face of Putin’s new expansionist streak -- was ready to impose broader economic sanctions against Russia if it pushed any harder against Ukraine.

“If the territorial integrity of Ukraine continues to be violated, then we will have to introduce economic sanctions,” said Merkel.

“Might does not make right,” she told a congress of her Christian Democratic Party.

Ashton also proclaimed that Europe was “prepared to take measures” against Russia.

“We are united to deal with threats against Ukraine,” she told an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Athens.

Yatsenyuk said he was busy trying to seal agreements with Ukraine’s western neighbours on gas deliveries that would cost about $150 per thousand cubic metres less than the price charged by Gazprom.

Ukraine has already received small quantities from Poland and Hungary despite the displeasure voiced over such shipments by Russia.

Yatsenyuk said he was also keen to secure an agreement with Slovakia -- a country that receives all its gas from Russia and has been unwilling to complicate relations with Gazprom in the past.

He added that Ukraine’s energy minister would hold talks on Tuesday in Brussels about so-called “reverse flow” deliveries of gas to Ukraine.

“We need specifics from our European partners,” said Yatsenyuk.

Gazprom chief Alexei Miller responded by warning that Russia would be looking closely at any independent deals its client states reached with Ukraine.

“European companies that are ready to provide reverse flow deliveries to Ukraine should take a very careful -- very careful -- look at the legitimacy of such sorts of operations,” said Miller.

“A pipeline cannot work in forward and reverse flow regimes at the same time,” he told Russian state television.

But Ukraine’s energy minister insisted that Kiev had no intention of diverting Gazprom deliveries intended for its European clients.

“There will be no theft,” Prodan said.

PERTH, Australia — A Chinese ship involved in the hunt for the missing Malaysian jetliner reported hearing a “pulse signal” Saturday in Indian Ocean waters with the same frequency emitted by the plane’s data recorders, as Malaysia vowed not to give up the search for the jet.

Military and civilian planes, ships with deep-sea searching equipment and a British nuclear submarine scoured a remote patch of the southern Indian Ocean off Australia’s west coast, in an increasingly urgent hunt for debris and the “black box” recorders that hold vital information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s last hours.

After weeks of fruitless looking, officials face the daunting prospect that sound-emitting beacons in the flight and voice recorders will soon fall silent as their batteries die after sounding electronic “pings” for a month.

A Chinese ship that is part of the search effort detected a “pulse signal” in southern Indian Ocean waters, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. Xinhua, however, said it had not yet been determined whether the signal was related to the missing plane, citing the China Maritime Search and Rescue Centre.

Xinhua said a black box detector deployed by the ship, Haixun 01, picked up a signal at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second), the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders.

Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, confirmed that the frequency emitted by Flight 370’s black boxes were 37.5 kilohertz and said authorities were verifying the report. The Australian government agency coordinating the search would not immediately comment on it.

John Goglia, a former US National Transportation Safety Board member, called the report “exciting”, but cautioned that “there is an awful lot of noise in the ocean”.

“One ship, one ping doesn’t make a success story,” he said. “It will have to be explored. I guarantee you there are other resources being moved into the area to see if it can be verified.”

The Boeing 777 disappeared March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard. So far, no trace of the jet has been found.

Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defence minister and acting transport minister, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that the cost of mounting the search was immaterial compared to providing solace for the families of those on board by establishing what happened.

“I can only speak for Malaysia and Malaysia will not stop looking for MH370,” Hishammuddin said.

He said an independent investigator would be appointed to lead a team that will try to determine what happened to Flight 370. The team will include three groups: One will look at airworthiness, including maintenance, structures and systems; another will examine operations, such as flight recorders and meteorology; and a third will consider medical and human factors.

The investigation team will include officials and experts from several nations, including Australia — which as the nearest country to the search zone is currently heading the hunt — China, the United States, Britain and France, Hishammuddin said.

A multinational search team is desperately trying to find debris floating in the water or faint sound signals from the data recorders that could lead them to the missing plane and unravel the mystery of its fate.

Finding floating wreckage is key to narrowing the search area, as officials can then use data on currents to backtrack to where the plane hit the water and where the flight recorders may be.

Beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries last for only about a month.

Officials have said the hunt for the wreckage is among the hardest ever undertaken and will get much harder still if the beacons fall silent before they are found.

“Where we’re at right now, four weeks since this plane disappeared, we’re much, much closer,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “But frustratingly, we’re still kilometres away from finding it. We need to find some piece of debris on the water; we need to pick up the ping.”

If it doesn’t happen, the only hope for finding the plane may be a full survey of the Indian Ocean floor, an operation that would take years and an enormous international operation.

Hishammuddin said there were no new satellite images or data that can provide new leads for searchers. The focus now is fully on the ocean search, he said.

Two ships — the Australian navy’s Ocean Shield and the British HMS Echo — carrying sophisticated equipment that can hear the recorders’ pings returned Saturday to an area investigators hope is close to where the plane went down. They concede the area they have identified is a best guess.

Up to 13 military and civilian planes and nine other ships took part in the search Saturday, the Australian agency coordinating the search said.

Because the US Navy’s pinger locator can pick up signals to a depth of 6,100 metres, it should be able to hear the plane’s data recorders even if they are in the deepest part of the search zone — about 5,800 metres. But that’s only if the locator gets within range of the black boxes — a tough task, given the size of the search area and the fact that the pinger locator must be dragged slowly through the water at just 1 to 5 knots (1 to 6 mph).

Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the joint agency coordinating the operation, acknowledged the search area was essentially a best guess and noted the time when the plane’s locator beacons would shut down was “getting pretty close”.

The overall search area is a 217,000-square-kilometre zone in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,700 kilometres northwest of the western Australian city of Perth.

ANKARA — Turkey lifted a much-criticised block on Twitter on Thursday, 24 hours after its highest court had overturned the ban as a breach of the right to free speech.

Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 20 shuttered access to the social media site after it had been used to spread a torrent of anonymous leaks implicating his inner circle in corruption.

Turkey’s NATO allies and international human rights groups strongly criticised the ban — as well as an ongoing block of video-sharing website YouTube — as a step backward for Turkey’s democracy.

On Wednesday Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled the Twitter ban violated free speech and ordered the communications ministry and telecoms authority to reverse it “with immediate effect”.

The government took 24 hours to react. First the telecoms authority TIB removed from its website a court order on the Twitter block and started contacting Internet service providers to lift the ban.

Shortly after — as many of Turkey’s Twitter accounts came live again —  the transport and communications ministry confirmed the move in a brief statement.

“In line with the decision made by the constitutional court... the measure blocking access to the Twitter.com Internet site has been removed,” it said. “After the necessary technical arrangements, the site will be opened to use.”

The ban had been widely circumvented by many of Turkey’s almost 12 million Twitter users, who have instead sent tweets via text message or by adjusting their Internet settings.

‘Sultan has agreed’ 

Many Twitter users quickly commented on the move, with Nervana Mahmoud writing from Egypt, “Joy to the world, the Sultan has agreed”, using a common nickname for Erdogan.

Turkish journalist Adem Yavuz Arslan urged caution, warning that users should maintain the VPNs or virtual private networks they have used to get around the ban.

“Twitter has been unblocked,” he wrote. “But do not change your VPN settings yet. Because the government has the plug on the Internet. It can pull it whenever it wants.”

San Francisco-based Twitter had Wednesday reacted, tweeting: “We welcome this constitutional court ruling and hope to have Twitter access restored in Turkey soon.”

When the micro-blogging service wasn’t live in Turkey by Thursday morning, critics started pushing, fearing that the government may ignore the order.

A lawmaker from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suggested on TV that the ruling may not be implemented immediately, saying: “We will evaluate the verdict.”

Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawmaker for the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party, warned that defying the court order “would mean an abuse of power”.

President Abdullah Gul, a regular Twitter user, said “the bans on Twitter and YouTube now need to be lifted”, speaking with journalists during a visit to Kuwait.

‘Anchor of stability’ 

Erdogan had ordered the Internet curbs in the lead-up to key local elections last Sunday, in which his party chalked up sweeping wins despite the claims of sleaze and graft and a harsh police crackdown on protesters last June.

Polling has shown that the Twitter and YouTube bans — despite earning rebukes from Brussels, Washington, rights group Amnesty International and a host of the world’s literary greats — had little effect on Erdogan’s conservative Muslim loyalists.

Research centre Ipsos found that only 3.6 per cent of AKP supporters said they had been influenced by the Internet blocks, and three quarters said the corruption claims had “no effect”.

Millions of Turks approve of Erdogan, despite criticism of a growing authoritarianism, because of the strong economic growth seen during his 11-year rule, analysts say.

“The Turkish economy is betting on Erdogan as an anchor of stability, and so are the people,” said Michael Meier of German think tank the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation.

“The corruption allegations are there, but at times of economic growth voters are pragmatic. That’s because there’s still enough left of the cake to go around.”

Meier said: “Erdogan has been able to touch the Turkish soul and pride... To many he embodies the dream of rising from a poor Istanbul neighbourhood to head of government.”

KIEV — Ukraine’s Western-backed leaders on Thursday blamed Russian agents and the country’s ousted president of organising two days of bloodshed in February that claimed nearly 90 lives.

The explosive allegations were levelled only moments before Russia responded to the new course taken by its ex-Soviet neighbour by hiking the price it must pay for gas shipments to what Ukrainian officials say is the highest rate for any European state.

Moscow also lashed out at its old Cold War nemesis NATO for building up the defences of ex-Communist and Soviet nations that have felt threatened by Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and massive buildup of forces near Ukraine.

The furious East-West battle for Ukraine’s future has exposed the deep divide that splits the nation of 46 million between those who see themselves as either culturally tied to Russia or a part of a broader Europe.

Those tensions exploded on February 18 when gunshots in the heart of snow-swept Kiev heralded the onset of pitch battles between riot police and protesters — some armed with nothing more than metal shields — that left scores dead.

Both sides have blamed the other for starting the violence. But no formal probe results had been unveiled until acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov presented his initial findings to reporters on Thursday.

Avakov’s conclusion was decisive and potentially devastating for the new leaders’ relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The acting interior minister said that deposed president Viktor Yanukovych had issued the “criminal order” to fire at the protesters while agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) helped him plan and carry out the assault.

“FSB agents took part in both the planning and execution of the so-called anti-terrorist operation,” Ukrainian Security Service head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko told the same press briefing.

An FSB spokesman told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency that Ukraine’s allegations were patently false. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for his part said “huge amounts of evidence” contradicted Kiev’s claims.

Yanukovych fled to Russia only days after the carnage and is now wanted in Kiev for allegedly ordering police to open fire against the crowds — a charge he denies but that is likely to keep him out of Ukraine for years to come.

“Former president Yanukovych will be prosecuted,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the BBC. “He is accused of mass murder and we will bring him to justice.”

The raging security crisis on the eastern edge of the European Union has been accompanied by months of economic pressure that Russia had poured on Ukraine in a seeming effort to force its leaders to reverse their Westward course.

Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom — long accused of being wielded by the Kremlin as a weapon against uncooperative neighbours — on Tuesday hiked the price it charges Ukraine for natural gas shipments on which its industries depend by 44 per cent.

The punitive but largely expected step eliminated a price discount that Putin had extended the old government in December in reward for its decision to reject closer EU ties.

But Ukraine saw the price it must pay for 1,000 cubic metres of gas jump by another $100 to $485.50 following a failed round of negotiations in Moscow with the chief executive of Russia’s state energy firm Gazprom.

Moscow argues that a $100 rebate it awarded Kiev in 2010 in return for its decision to extend a lease under which the Kremlin keeps its Black Sea Fleet in Crimea no longer applied because the peninsula was now a part of Russia.

Kiev has vowed to contest the new charge — a warning that threatens a repeat of the 2006 and 2009 halts in gas supplies to Ukraine that also affected many of Russia’s other European clients.

“This is an unacceptable price for Ukraine because it is a political price,” said Ukraine’s Energy Minister Yuriy Prodan.

Europe’s worst security crisis in decades appeared to be only gaining momentum after NATO boosted the air power of Eastern European nations that Putin still views as part of Russia’s strategic domain.

The 28-nation bloc has said firmly it did not intend to get militarily involved in Ukraine no matter what Russia did.

But the alliance has vowed to review both its immediate strategy and historic mission after conceding that a Russian strike against Ukraine — a non-NATO member with an ill-equiped and underfunded army — could be both decisive and quick.

PERTH, Australia — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak vowed Thursday “we will not rest” until the fate of flight MH370 is known, as Australia called it “the most difficult search in human history”.

Najib toured the military base in Perth being used as a staging post in the hunt for the Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people that is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean.

“We want to find answers. We want to provide comfort to the families and we will not rest until answers are indeed found,” Najib said, as he thanked those involved in the eight-nation search.

Despite extensive scouring of the remote southern Indian Ocean, no debris that would indicate a crash site has been found, with time running out to locate the plane’s “black box” which only emits a signal for around 30 days.

Najib admitted the exhaustive hunt for the Boeing 777 that vanished on March 8 was a “gargantuan task”, but said he was confident that “in due time we will provide a closure to this event, on this tragedy”.

Kuala Lumpur’s response has been widely criticised, especially by distraught relatives of the 153 Chinese nationals aboard.

Najib left without taking questions, as a reporter called out a query about Malaysia’s handling of the crisis.

Adding to the frustration for families affected, Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said Wednesday a criminal investigation into what caused the flight to veer from its intended route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing had so far been inconclusive.

In contrast, Australia’s mobilisation since it was handed increased responsibility in the search effort has been praised.

Australia has far more experience than Malaysia of rescue operations, routinely monitoring huge tracts of ocean, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the current search was the toughest ever.

“Every day, working on the basis of just small pieces of information, we are putting the jigsaw together. And every day we have a higher degree of confidence that we know more about what happened to this ill-fated flight,” he said.

“It is a very difficult search, the most difficult in human history, but as far as Australia is concerned we are throwing everything we have at it.”

International cooperation 

Eight nations, many of whom do not normally work together, have rallied to look for clues in the Indian Ocean to one of the greatest aviation mysteries the world has seen.

Both Najib and Abbott hailed the “truly remarkable” cooperation between Australia, Britain, China, Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Korea and the United States.

“It shows what we can do, and if anyone would ever be unhappy or distraught about the prospects for international peace and harmony, this operation is a marvellous antidote to pessimism,” said Abbott.

A British nuclear submarine with underwater search capabilities on Wednesday joined planes and ships scouring the vast oceanic search zone, but again nothing was reported found.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is directing the search, said eight planes and nine ships were involved Thursday as they further refined the search area, moving it to west north-west of Perth.

Australia’s Ocean Shield naval vessel, which is fitted with a US-supplied “black box” detector, is due to arrive in the area Friday. But without a confirmed crash site, hopes of finding the device are slim.

Passengers cleared
of suspicion

Malaysian police chief Khalid on Wednesday said all 227 passengers had been “cleared” of suspicion, as authorities probe a possible hijack or sabotage plot.

Police are still investigating the backgrounds of the plane’s 12 crew, as well as ground staff and flight engineers.

Authorities still have no idea how or why the plane vanished, and warn that unless the black box is found, the mystery may never be solved.

The battery-powered signal from the black box — which records flight data and cockpit voice communications — is expected to expire within days.

On Wednesday, Malaysian officials sought to explain to sceptical relatives their conclusion — based on complex satellite data — that the plane went down in the Indian Ocean.

That determination has outraged some families who say wreckage must first be recovered.

“I know that until we find the plane, many families cannot start to grieve,” Najib said.

“I cannot imagine what they must be going through. But I can promise them that we will not give up.”

FORT HOOD, Texas — The soldier suspected of gunning down three people before killing himself at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas was under psychiatric care but showed no signs of violence or suicidal tendencies, the secretary of the US Army said on Thursday.

There was no motive given for the incident, which also left 16 wounded, although officials have so far ruled out terrorism in the second mass shooting at the base in five years.

The gunman, who had been treated for depression and anxiety, was yet to be officially named but security officials said preliminary information identified the gunman as Ivan Lopez.

US Army Secretary John McHugh said the soldier, who joined the service in 2008, had served two tours of duty abroad, including four months in Iraq in 2011. He had no direct involvement in combat and suffered no wounds.

“He was undergoing a variety of treatment and diagnoses for mental health conditions, ranging from depression to anxiety to some sleep disturbance. He was prescribed a number of drugs to address those, including Ambien,” McHugh told a US Senate committee hearing.

“The background checks we have done thus far show no involvement with extremist organisations of any kind,” he said.

McHugh said the soldier and his wife were from Puerto Rico, and that he had served in the Puerto Rican national guard before joining the US Army.

The suspect’s wife was cooperating with law enforcement officers, a Federal Bureau of Investigation official said, according to CNN.

In a news conference late on Wednesday, Fort Hood commanding officer Lieutenant General Mark Milley said the shooter was undergoing evaluation for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The shooter had “self-reported” a traumatic brain injury after returning from Iraq but was never wounded in action, Milley said. He arrived in Fort Hood in February from another military installation.

At about 4:00pm local time (2100 GMT) on Wednesday, the soldier went to two buildings on the base and opened fire before he was confronted by military police, Milley said.

The gunman then shot himself in the head with a .45-caliber pistol. Milley said law enforcement was looking into reports of an argument at the base ahead of the shooting.

Heartbroken

The rampage is the third shooting at a military base in the United States in about six months that, along with a series of shootings in schools and malls, has sparked a national debate over gun-control regulations.

The Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas, where some of the wounded were taken, said nine patients were in intensive care, of which three were in critical condition and six were stable.

US President Barack Obama said he was “heartbroken” another shooting had occurred and that the incident “reopens the pain of what happened at Fort Hood five years ago”.

“We are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” Obama said.

The incident highlights the US military’s so-far frustrated efforts to secure its bases from potential shooters, who increasingly appear to target the facilities.

Milley said the shooter walked into one of the unit buildings, opened fire, then got into a vehicle and fired from there. He then went into another building and opened fire again, until he was engaged by Fort Hood law enforcement officers.

When confronted by a female military police officer, he shot himself with his semi-automatic weapon in the parking lot.

“He was approaching her at about 20 feet. He put his hands up, then reached under his jacket, pulled out the [.45] and she pulled out her weapon and then she engaged, and he then put the weapon to his head,” Milley said.

One of the buildings housed medical brigade day-to-day operations and the other, nearby, served the administration of the transportation battalion.

Security overhaul

As soon as the shooting broke out, the base went on lockdown. Police secured the base perimetre, emergency vehicles rushed to the scene, helicopters circled Fort Hood and officers went from building to building searching for the shooter.

Fort Hood, a base from which soldiers prepare to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, had overhauled its security to better deal with potential “insider threats” after a 2009 rampage by an Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people and wounded 32 others.

In September, a gunman opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 and wounding four before being killed by police. Last month, a civilian shot dead a sailor aboard a ship at a US Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia.

US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered steps to improve Pentagon security after reviews found the Navy Yard shooting could have been averted if the gunman’s mental health had been properly handled.

IQUIQUE, Chile — Authorities in northern Chile discovered surprisingly light damage and just six reported deaths Wednesday from a magnitude-8.2 quake — a remarkably low toll for such a powerful shift in the Earth’s crust.

President Michelle Bachelet arrived in Iquique before noon to review damage after declaring a state of emergency. Hours earlier, she sent a military plane with 100 anti-riot police to join 300 soldiers deployed to prevent looting and round up escaped prisoners.

Thousands of people evacuated from low-lying areas were returning home after a spending a long night outside due to the threat of a tsunami. The government’s mandatory order to leave the coast was spread through cell phone text messages and Twitter, and reinforced by blaring sirens in neighbourhoods where people regularly practice earthquake drills.

Seawater flooded city streets and washed away some fishing boats in Iquique, but by early Wednesday no major tsunami damage was apparent. Chile’s entire coast was initially subject to the mandatory evacuation order, which lasted nearly 10 hours in coastal communities closest to the offshore epicenter.

The shaking that began at 8:46pm Tuesday also touched off landslides that blocked roads, knocked out power for thousands, damaged an airport and started fires that destroyed several businesses. Some homes made of adobe were destroyed in Arica, another city close to the quake’s offshore epicenter.

Mining in Chile, which is the world’s top copper producing nation, was not affected, although world prices for the red metal jumped as the quake raised supply concerns because most of the Chilean mining industry is in the northern regions.

About 300 inmates escaped from a women’s prison in the city of Iquique, forcing the closure of the border with Peru. Officials said some two dozen had been captured early Wednesday.

Bachelet, who just returned to the presidency three weeks ago, waited five hours after the quake struck to address her nation. It was not lost on many Chileans that the last time she presided over a major quake, days before the end of her 2006-10 term, her emergency preparedness office prematurely waved off a tsunami danger. Most of the 500 dead from that magnitude-8.8 tremor survived the shaking, only to be caught in killer waves in a disaster that destroyed 220,000 homes and washed away large parts of many coastal communities.

“The country has done a good job of confronting the emergency. I call on everyone to stay calm and follow the authorities’ instructions,” Bachelet tweeted after Tuesday night’s temblor.

She put her interior minister in direct charge of coordinating the emergency response, and announced that schools would be suspended in evacuated areas while authorities assessed the damage.

The only US impact might be higher waves Wednesday for Hawaii’s swimmers and surfers, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii said.

The US Geological Survey said the temblor was centreed in the Pacific Ocean 99 kilometres northwest from coastal Iquique. More than 20 significant aftershocks followed, including one of magnitude 6.2.

The quake was so strong that the shaking experienced in Bolivia’s capital about 470 kilometres away was the equivalent of a magnitude-4.5 tremor, authorities there said.

But Tuesday night’s quake was not the big one seismologists expect eventually.

“Could be tomorrow, could be in 50 years; we do not know when it’s going to occur. But the key point here is that this magnitude-8.2 is not the large earthquake that we were expecting for this area. We’re actually still expecting potentially an even larger earthquake,” said Mike Simons, a seismologist at the Geological Survey.

Chile is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries because just off the coast, the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera to ever-higher altitudes. Nowhere along this fault is the pressure greater than in far northern Chile, an area known as the “Iquique seismic gap”.

The USGS says the seismic gap last saw a major quake in 1877, when a magnitude-8.8 quake unleashed a tsunami that caused major damage along the Chile-Peru coast and fatalities as far away as Hawaii and Japan. Another quake of similar force hit just north of the area in 1868.

“This is the one remaining gap that hasn’t had an earthquake in the last 140 years,” said Simons. “We know these two plates come together at about 6, 7 centimetres a year, and if you multiply that by 140 years then the plates should have moved about 11 metres along the fault, and you can make an estimate of the size of earthquake we expect here.”

The latest activity began with a strong magnitude-6.7 quake on March 16 that caused more than 100,000 people to briefly evacuate low-lying areas. Hundreds of smaller quakes followed in the weeks since, keeping people on edge.

KUALA LUMPUR — A police investigation may never determine the reason why the Malaysia Airlines jetliner disappeared, and search planes scouring the Indian Ocean for any sign of its wreckage aren’t certain to find anything either, officials said Wednesday.

The assessment by Malaysian and Australian officials underscored the lack of knowledge authorities have about what happened on Flight 370. It also points to a scenario that becomes more likely with every passing day — that the fate of the Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board might remain a mystery forever.

The plane disappeared March 8 on a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur after its transponders, which make the plane visible to commercial radar, were shut off. Military radar picked up the jet just under an hour later, on the other side of the Malay Peninsula. Authorities say that until then its “movements were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” but have not ruled out anything, including mechanical error.

Police are investigating the pilots and crew for any evidence suggesting they may have hijacked or sabotaged the plane. The backgrounds of the passengers, two-thirds of whom were Chinese, have been checked by local and international investigators and nothing suspicious has been found.

“Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing,” Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters. “At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident.”

Police are also investigating the cargo and the food served on the plane to eliminate possible poisoning of passengers and crew, he said.

The search for the plane began over the Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea, where the plane’s last communications were, and then shifted west to the Strait of Malacca, where it was last spotted by military radar. Experts then analysed hourly satellite “handshakes” between the plane and a satellite and now believe it crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

A search there began just over two weeks ago, and now involves at least nine ships and nine planes.

The British government said a nuclear-powered submarine with advanced underwater search capability had arrived in the southern Indian Ocean.

The current search area is a 221,000-square kilometre patch of sea roughly a 2½-hour flight from Perth.

Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency coordinating the multinational search effort out of Australia, said no time frame had been set for the search to end, but that a new approach would be needed if nothing showed up.

“Over time, if we don’t find anything on the surface, we’re going to have to think about what we do next, because clearly it’s vitally important for the families, it’s vitally important for the governments involved that we find this airplane,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Flight Lieutenant Dave O’Brien, captain of an Australian P-3 Orion that arrived back after dark Wednesday at base Pearce near Perth, said it was another fruitless day of searching despite favourable weather and sea conditions.

“We didn’t see anything at all of interest,” he said. “So a fairly quiet day for us out there. However, we are back out tomorrow to try it all again.”

With no other data available indicating where the plane went down, spotting wreckage is key to narrowing down the search area and ultimately finding the plane’s flight data recorders, which would provide a wealth of information about the condition the plane was flying under and the communications or sounds in the cockpit.

The data recorders emit a “ping” that can be detected by special equipment towed by a ship in the immediate vicinity. But the battery-powered recorders stop transmitting the pings about 30 days after a crash. Locating the data recorders and wreckage after that is possible, but it becomes an even more daunting task.

Malaysia has been criticised by the relatives of some Chinese passengers on board, who accuse it of not providing enough information or even lying about what it knows about the final movements of the plane. In the early days of the crisis, the Chinese government itself expressed irritation at the speed of the probe and the lack of information.

On Wednesday, China’s ambassador to Malaysia sought to distance the government from the more strident criticism, perhaps concerned about any lasting damage to ties between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur.

“I wish to responsibly point out that these extreme and even somewhat irresponsible views are not representative of the overall group of Chinese relatives and even more so not representative of the Chinese government’s attitude,” Huang Huikang told reporters.

Scores of relatives are staying in hotels in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, courtesy of Malaysia Airlines.

Authorities organised a closed-door briefing in Malaysia for the families with officials and experts involved in the hunt, including the chief of the Malaysian air force.

It was relayed by video conferencing technologies to the relatives in Beijing. Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said officials answered all the questions raised by the relatives and that they had “a very good meeting”. Several relatives interviewed after the session said officials showed them more satellite and other data, but that they were still not satisfied.

“The fact is they didn’t give us any convincing information,” said Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families in Beijing. “They said themselves that there are many different possibilities, but they are judging on the basis of just one of them.”

Malaysian officials have on occasion given conflicting accounts and contradictory information over the last three weeks. They maintain they are doing their best in what it is an unprecedented situation, and stress they want the same thing as the families, namely to locate the plane as quickly as possible.