A woman cries at the arrival hall of the International Airport in Beijing, China, Saturday, March 8, 2014. Relatives and friends were arriving at Beijing airport for news after a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 was reported missing on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing Saturday. AP
MANILA, Philippines—The Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing Saturday morning reportedly crashed off the coast of a Vietnamese island, a navy officer said in Vietnamese state media, but a Malaysian minister said they were still verifying the report.
The plane supposedly crashed in the waters between Vietnam and Malaysia, some 300 kilometers off Tho Chu Island in Kien Giang Province, Vietnam’s Tuoi Tre news said quoting a statement of the Vietnamese High Command of Navy.
The report did not mention wreckage being located.
But Malaysia’s transportation minister Seri Hishammuddin said in a CNN report that there was no evidence that the plane had crashed.
Contact from the plane bound for Beijing was lost at 2:40 a.m. Malaysian time (1840 GMT Friday), about two hours after take-off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the carrier’s CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said in an Agence France-Presse report.
The Boeing 777-200 was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
They included 153 Chinese nationals plus one infant, 38 Malaysians, and 12 Indonesians.
Seven Australians also were aboard, three French nationals, four from the United States including one infant, plus passengers from several other countries.
No Filipinos were reported to be aboard the missing plane.
Malaysia Airlines has a good safety record. Its worst-ever crash occurred in 1977, when 93 passengers and 7 crew perished in a hijacking and subsequent crash in southern Malaysia.
The pilot of MH370 is Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, who has flown for the airline since 1981, the carrier said.
Its first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, joined the airline in 2007.
The plane is more than 11 years old. With Agence France-Presse
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