Compensation hearings for the relatives of Chinese victims who perished on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which vanished almost ten years ago, were scheduled to start on Monday in a Beijing court.
On March 8, 2014, the plane that was carrying 239 passengers, most of them were from China, disappeared while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
A 120,000-square-kilometer (46,000-square-mile) search area in the Indian Ocean yielded very little evidence of the aircraft, and the largest-ever aviation effort, headed by Australia, was called off in January 2017.
Over the Indian Ocean, some debris has been picked up.
Jiang Hui, whose mother was on flight MH370, wrote on social media this month the court hearings would begin Monday at Beijing’s People’s Court in Chaoyang district and continue until mid-December.
Beijing’s state-run China Daily has also reported the hearings, citing Jiang. The hearing was not listed on the court’s public website.
AFP reporters saw that on Monday morning, media representatives and relatives of the deceased congregated outside the court.
In 2018, a US exploration company began a private search for MH370, however it was called off after several months of fruitless searching of the ocean floor.
There have been many hypotheses regarding the loss of the jet over the years, ranging from the plausible to the absurd, one of which being that veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone rogue.
Malaysian officials stated in 2016 that although the pilot had used a home flight simulator to map a route over the Indian Ocean, this did not indicate he intentionally crashed the aircraft.
A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually.
But they failed to come up with any firm conclusions, leaving relatives angry and disappointed.
