MH370 anniversary: Malaysia remains committed to finding missing plane

Malaysia remains committed to finding flight MH370, said PM Najib Razak on the first anniversary of its disappearance.

Relatives of the 239 missing passengers and crew are holding a series of remembrance ceremonies.

The Malaysian airliner was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished on March 8, 2014. No trace has ever been found.

Meanwhile, the Malaysian government has released its official report into the disappearance of flight MH370.

The report contains masses of technical information about the missing aircraft, its maintenance record, the background of the crew, and the various air traffic control and military radar tracking records of the plane.

It appears to offer no significant new information which might explain where the plane went, or what happened to it.

“No words can describe the pain the families of those on board are going through. The lack of answers and definitive proof – such as aircraft wreckage – has made this more difficult to bear,” said Najib Razak in a statement.

He added that the search team had followed the “little evidence that exists” but remained “hopeful” that the plane would be found.

The international search team is focusing on an area of the southern Indian Ocean, approximately 1,000 miles off the coast of western Australia.

Earlier on Sunday, the families of MH370 crew members held a remembrance ceremony at the house of missing in-flight supervisor Patrick Gomez.

“We’re always thinking exactly what happened on that day itself, you know the conversations that we were having, the tears, the hugs that we were giving each other,” said his wife, Jacquita Gonzales.

The event has not been billed as a commemoration ceremony because many family members still believe that their loved ones are alive.

The search team is due to release an interim report about MH370 later today.

Earlier, Malaysia’s Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said that he was confident that the plane would be found in the southern Indian Ocean.

Liow Tiong Lai promised his government would continue to back the search and said he was confident they could complete the search operation “hopefully by May this year”.

He told AFP that investigators would go “back to the drawing board” if the search failed to yield results by May.

Some families of those on board the plane have accused the Malaysian authorities of hiding some information, but the transport minister urged them not to believe the conspiracy theories.

Earlier this year, the Malaysian government declared flight MH370 to have been lost with all on board, in a move it said was necessary to start processing compensation claims for the families.