New hint on MH370 location

The hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will concentrate more on the southern sector of the current search zone after latest analysis showed the plane may have taken a southerly course at an earlier point than previously assumed, Australian officials said on Thursday.

Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said analysis of a failed satellite phone call to Flight 370 by the airline had suggested "that the aircraft might have turned south a little earlier than we had previously expected."

"The search area remains the same, but (...) some of the information that we now have suggests to us that areas a little further to the south (...) may be of particular interest and priority in the search area," Truss told reporters.

The airliner, a Boeing 777, disappeared on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 passengers and crew on board. Months of searches have failed to find any trace of the plane, which data analysis has shown to have flown far off course for reasons as yet unknown.

Cost-sharing agreement

As the hunt for the plane progresses to the next phase, Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai and Australia on Thursday signed an agreement in the Australian capital, Canberra, to share the costs of the search, estimated to be as much as 52 million Australian dollars (36.83 euros, $48.65 million).

The phase is expected to start within a month and go on for up to a year. It is to focus on a 60,000-square-kilometer (23,000-square-mile) area some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) west of the western Australian city of Perth.

Two survey ships from the Dutch engineering firm Fugro are already mapping the entire search area in preparation for the search phase, along with a Chinese naval vessel.

Malaysia, as the country where the airliner was flagged, has overall responsibility for the crash investigation, but Australia has search and rescue responsibility for the area of the Indian Ocean where the plane is thought to have come down.

Chinese Vice-Minister of transport He Jianzhong, who also attended Thursday's Canberra meeting, said the ministers had all agreed that the search would not be interrupted or given up. One hundred and fifty-three of the lost passengers were Chinese.

Malaysia Airlines has lost two of its aircraft under more or less mysterious circumstances this year, after Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on 17 July amid fighting there between pro-Russian separatists and government forces.

tj/hc (Reuters, AP, AFP)