China said on Saturday it had a new satellite image of what could be wreckage from the missing Malaysian airliner, as more planes and ships headed to join an international search operation scouring some of the remotest seas on earth.
The latest possible lead came as the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 entered its third week, with still no confirmed trace found of the Boeing 777 or the 239 people on board.
The new potential sighting was dramatically announced by Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, after he was handed a note with details during a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, scooping the official announcement from China.
“Chinese ships have been dispatched to the area,” he told reporters.
China said the object was 22 metres long and 13 metres wide, and spotted around 120 km “south by west” of potential debris reported by Australia off its west coast in the forbidding waters of the southern Indian Ocean. The image was captured by the high-definition earth observation satellite “Gaofen-1” early on March 18, two days after the Australian satellite picture was taken, said China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) on its website.
It could not easily be determined from the blurred images whether the objects were the same, but the Chinese photograph could depict a cluster of smaller objects, said a senior military officer from one of the 26 nations involved in the search for the plane.
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