India Suspends Its Search for Flight 370

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/india-flight-370-missing-airplane.html

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PORT BLAIR, India — After scouring more than 24,000 nautical square miles, India on Sunday suspended its search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the waters around the isolated Andaman and Nicobar Islands chain while officials in Kuala Lumpur consider where else to search.

“We’re taking a temporary pause,” said a senior Indian military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to discuss the search publicly. “We are conserving our resources so that we can renew the hunt with great vigor.”

Four Indian military ships and six aircraft have spent most of the past four days scanning huge expanses of ocean on both sides of the Andamans, of which Port Blair is the capital. Malaysian officials believe that Flight 370 was deliberately flown off course, and one theory has been that it was headed toward the island chain.

But the Andamans are not on either of the two vast corridors of territory where the Malaysian authorities now believe the plane ended up, based on its last transmission to a satellite at 8:11 a.m. on March 8.

There are hundreds of deserted tropical islands in this area, and nighttime radar coverage of the skies is not always robust, military officials said. So it is possible that a Boeing 777 could have flown over the area and perhaps crashed on or near an uninhabited island without being noticed, officials said. But India’s military has done such a thorough search of the region since Wednesday that such a scenario, always unlikely, has become almost impossible to believe, officials said.

Still, they are eager to demonstrate their willingness to continue searching until all hope fades. Holi, one of India’s most important religious holidays, is on Monday, but military officials said their men will not celebrate it this year.

“Holi or no Holi, we will search when the task comes,” the senior military official said. “The families of those missing come first.”

Since the ships would need 10 or more hours to return to port, officials have instructed captains to remain in the search area while the Malaysian government reconsiders where to send them.

On Friday, officials here had some brief hope of a break in the case when pilots spotted smoke rising from the Sentinel Islands, a set of small islands with nearly impenetrable jungle and an aboriginal population that largely shuns the outside world.

But a helicopter flew over the smoldering area and determined that the fire was probably set by local residents for agricultural purposes. The helicopter came back with photos of yellow flames and two nearly naked men on a pristine white beach, brandishing spears.

“The islands there are tribal, and the policy is to leave them alone,” said V. Anbarasan, the commandant of the Indian Coast Guard in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “There’s no wreckage there.”

India has been eager to demonstrate its ability to police these waters, as they include busy shipping lanes and China has become increasingly assertive in the nearby South China Sea.