Malaysia says search to shift to smaller area

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Malaysia said Tuesday that it has narrowed the search for a downed jetliner to an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma in the southern Indian Ocean, while Australia said improved weather would allow the hunt for possible debris from the plane to resume.

The comments from Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein came a day after the country's prime minister announced that a new analysis of satellite data confirmed the plane had crashed in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 aboard.

But the searchers will face a daunting task of combing a vast expanse of choppy seas for suspected remnants of the aircraft sighted earlier.

"We're not searching for a needle in a haystack we're still trying to define where the haystack is," Australia's deputy defense chief, Air Marshal Mark Binskin, told reporters at a military base in Perth, Australia, as idled planes stood behind him.

There had been two corridors based on rough satellite data for the search. Hishammuddin said operations had been halted in the northern corridor that swept up from Malaysia toward Central Asia, as well as in the northern section of the southern corridor that arches down from Malaysia toward Antarctica.

That still leaves a large area of 1.6 million square kilometers (622,000 square miles), but just 20 percent of the area that was previously being searched.

In remarks to the Malaysian Parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Najib Razak cautioned that the search will take a long time and "we will have to face unexpected and extraordinary challenges."

This comes as state news agency Xinhua said that Chinese President Xi Jinping will send a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur to consult with the Malaysian government over the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Xinhua said Xi "has ordered to send a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur". It did not name the envoy.

In a separate statement, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China will ask Malaysia to provide more detailed and accurate information on the plane, according to a government microblog account.

Li said the most important task at present is to search for the missing plane and he expressed sympathy to the family members.

Earlier, China's Foreign Ministry said it hopes Britain will provide satellite data by British firm Inmarsat on the missing Malaysian Airlines plane.

When asked whether China wants Britain to give China the satellite information, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said he hoped the "relevant country" could provide it.

Citing groundbreaking satellite-data analysis by Inmarsat, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished more than two weeks ago while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, dozens of angry relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner clashed with police outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing on Tuesday as they demanded the airline and the government in Kuala Lumpur explain what happened.

The relatives threw water bottles at police, who had formed a human wall around the embassy gate. Many of the protesters were pushed back, witnesses said. A woman who fainted was carried away on a stretcher.

REUTERS