Fourth ship to join search for missing Malaysian airliner

CANBERRA, Australia – A fourth ship with specialized underwater sonar equipment will join the search for a Malaysia Airlines jet 10 months after it vanished under mysterious circumstances, an Australian official said Monday.

The ship Fugro Supporter was on its way to the search area after conducting trials off the Indonesian island of Bali, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said in a statement.

“Fugro Supporter has been equipped with a Kongsberg HUGIN 4500 autonomous underwater vehicle,” the statement said. “The AUV will be used to scan those portions of the search area that cannot be searched effectively by the equipment on other vessels.”

Not a single trace of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been found since the Boeing 777 vanished with 239 people aboard on March 8 last year during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The jetliner veered sharply off course and flew for hours with its communications systems disabled before disappearing.

Three ships – two provided by a Dutch contractor and one from Malaysia – have already been scouring 60,000-square-kilometre (23,000-square-mile) area of the Indian Ocean about 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) west of Australia.

Since October, the ships have searched more than 12,000 square kilometres (4,600 square miles) of the seafloor with towed sonar equipment – or one-fifth of the highest-priority search zone.

Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the agency leading the search, said the unmanned submarine equipment would be used to take a second, closer look at difficult seabed terrain where towed sonar was less thorough.

“Because the terrain remains complex, there’s a possibility that there’ll be some areas that we can’t do with the towed sonar, and so we’re getting an autonomous underwater vehicle as the alternative option,” Dolan said. “We think we’ve got pretty good coverage already, but this will give us a 100 per cent guarantee.”

The underwater drone moves slower than the towed sonar equipment and will not hasten the search, which is expected to end around May if nothing is found earlier, Dolan said.

No additional equipment will be needed to ensure a thorough search of the mountainous terrain, which ranges from 600 metres (2,000 feet) to 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) deep, he said.

The Fugro Supporter is jointly funded by the Australian and Malaysian governments. It is expected to join the search in late January, Truss said.

Source: http://globalnews.ca/

29 arrested over Malaysia `birthday orgy`

Colombo: Hundreds of lawyers in Sri Lanka today took to street, demanding resignation of Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, who was appointed by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa after the impeachment of the country's first woman top judge allegedly out of personal vendetta.


Peiris, a confidante of Rajapaksa, was inducted in office in January 2013 after the impeachment and sacking of his predecessor Shirani Bandaranayake on corruption charges despite protests by rights groups, citizens, clergy and lawyers.

Bandaranayake's removal was pronounced unlawful by courts and also condemned by international community. It was cited even in the UN Human Rights Council resolutions adopted against the Rajapaksa administration.
She had denied all the charges against her and alleged that she had been sacked by Rajapaksa "through improper procedure due to personal vendetta".

Several lawyers had vehemently protested against the sacking of Bandaranayake and vowed not to cooperate with Peiris.

"We want him to go with dignity," Upul Jayasuriya, the Chairman of the lawyers' body, Bar Association of Sri Lanka said today.

"We will give him time until tomorrow to resign, if he did not we shall be back here protesting tomorrow," Sunil Watagala, a lawyer said.
In the run up to the January 8 presidential election, the joint opposition had pledged to restore Bandaranayake in her position as the 43rd Chief Justice.


Kuala Lumpur : Police in mainly Muslim Malaysia arrested 29 people including two auxiliary police officers in a raid on an birthday party which they said Monday had turned into a drug-fuelled orgy.

Officers were called to a hotel in the town of Klang near the capital Kuala Lumpur early Sunday after a complaint about noise in one of the rooms.

Ten women and 19 men were arrested while drugs including heroin, ecstasy and ketamine were impounded, police said.

"We suspect it to be a sex orgy cum birthday party," said North Klang police chief Mohamad Shukor Sulong.

A police officer involved in the investigation told AFP on condition of anonymity that all 29 were ethnic Malays, who belong to the multi-cultural country`s Muslim majority, and ranged in age from 20 to 35.

"They brought girls, drugs and beer to celebrate the birthday party," the officer said.

Premarital sex and lewd behaviour are deeply frowned upon in Malaysia, which has traditionally practised a relatively moderate brand of Islam yet remains conservative on sexual issues.

Muslims who are merely caught alone in a secluded place with a member of the opposite sex who is not a relation can face up to two years` jail and a fine.

Muslims make up more than half the country`s nearly 30 million people.

Slow progress in AirAsia crash search

Recovery teams made patchy progress on Tuesday (Jan 6) in the search for bodies from the wreckage of AirAsia Flight 8501, finding the remains of just two more victims on the tenth day of operations.

Indonesia has ordered the suspension of aviation officials involved in the departure of the flight. It says the flight operated by AirAsia Indonesia was flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed.

The airline, a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, has been suspended from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route -- although Singapore officials said they had given permission for the flight at their end. Indonesia's transport ministry also promised action against any domestic airlines violating their flying permits in the country, which has a patchy aviation safety record.

The Indonesian meteorological agency BMKG has said weather was the "triggering factor" of the crash, with ice likely damaging the plane's engines. The initial report by BMKG into the likely cause referred to infra-red satellite pictures that showed the plane was passing through clouds with temperatures of minus 80 to minus 85 degrees Celsius.

But it remained unclear why other planes on similar routes were unaffected by the weather, and other analysts said there was not enough information to explain the disaster until the flight recorders were recovered.

In Surabaya, which was home to a number of the victims, a crisis centre has been up for identifying bodies and wakes have been held as they are returned to relatives.

Eric Edi Santo lost his aunt and five other family members, but so far only two of their bodies have been found. He was holding out hope for the others. "They died so tragically, at least I want them to have a proper burial," he said.

Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/