The announcement that the missing Malaysian plane crashed in the southern Indian Ocean with no survivors devastated relatives of the 154 Chinese passengers who broke down and wept uncontrollably at a hotel here.
Following the announcement by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak that MH370 had crashed, a highly emotional scenes prevailed at the hotel near the airport where over 200 relatives of passengers had been accommodated by the Malaysia Airlines during the past three weeks.
The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200 with 239 people, including five Indians and 154 Chinese, went missing on March 8 an hour after taking off form Kuala Lumpur.
Anticipating emotional outbursts, the airlines kept three medical teams ready.
The airlines offered to fly them to Australia, the nearest point from where many of the planes and ships are operating to spot the wreckage and retrieve it from the southern Indian Ocean.
As the mystery over the missing plane continued for three weeks, hopes of the grief-stricken relatives swung from one end to another as investigations pointed to a possible hijack, which meant the plane could have landed somewhere and the passengers may have been alive.
It was not the relatives of passengers who broke down but also some of the CCTV journalists wept uncontrollably while reporting on the plight of Chinese relatives.
Few days ago the mother of one of the Chinese relatives, who hit headlines across the world for trying to gate crash into a press conference being held by the Malaysian officials, gave a highly moving interview to CCTV and said she strongly believed that her son was alive and scuffed at reports of debris being sighted.
China, which has been scouring the Pacific and Indian Oceans over the past three weeks, rushed its planes and ships to the remote southern Indian Ocean after debris suspected to be that of the plane was spotted.
A Chinese plane too reported to have spotted some suspected objects. China has been pressing Malaysia to step up the search operations as nearly one third of the passengers were its nationals.
China's icebreaker for Antarctic research Xuelong and a cargo ship are expected to arrive tomorrow in waters where debris possibly linked to the plane was spotted. More vessels are heading for the waters, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing today.
China Maritime Search and Rescue Center has coordinated merchant ships to search an area of 40,000 square kilometres, covering the Bay of Bengal and waters off Indonesia and Australia, Hong said.
China's Ministry of Agriculture has coordinated 20 fishing boats to assist in the search, he added.
