“I have directed an internal investigation team of experts to look at the report, and there is a likelihood that next week we could release the report,” Najib told CNN in an interview aired late Thursday.
The government was so far been tight-lipped about its investigation into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet, fuelling anger and frustration among the relatives of the 239 people aboard the plane.
The Boeing 777 vanished on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and is now believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, where an Australian-led effort is under way to recover its flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
Malaysia’s government has come under fire for a seemingly chaotic initial response, while the scarcity of official information on MH370 has prompted questions over its transparency.
Malaysia’s transport minister pledged earlier this month that any data that is eventually recovered from the plane’s “black box” will be publicly released.
In his CNN interview, Najib also stressed that his government was not yet prepared to declare the passengers on board flight MH370 dead.
“At some point in time I would be, but right now I think I need to take into account the feelings of the next of kin — and some of them have said publicly that they aren’t willing to accept it until they find hard evidence,” Najib said.
But he added it was “hard to imagine otherwise”.
Relatives of the passengers recently denounced the Malaysian government’s suggestion that it would soon look into issuing death certificates for those on board despite no proof yet of what happened to the plane.
Bizarre scenario
And for the first time the Malaysians have officially confirmed that MH370 was tracked by military radar when it turned back and crossed Malaysia.
“The military radar, the primary radar has some capability. It tracked an aircraft which did a turn back, but they were not sure, exactly sure, whether it was MH370. What they were sure of was that the aircraft was not deemed to be hostile,” Najib said.
Asked why military jets didn’t intercept MH370 Najib said the plane was not “deemed not to be hostile.”
On the critical Inmarsat satellite tracking data on which the current search is based Najib said that initially he did not believe it.
“To be honest I found it hard to believe.
“It’s a bizarre scenario, which none of us could have contemplated so that’s why when I met the team…(of) foremost experts in aviation industry. I asked them again and again are you sure?”
“And their answer to me was we are as sure as we can possibly be,” Najib told CNN.
Najib was also pressed on the handling of the crisis.
While noting that the disappearance is unprecedented and technically challenging Najib conceded that “we didn’t get our communications right, to begin with.”
“I’m prepared to say that there are things that we did well, there are things that we didn’t do too well.”
Asked about long-lasting damage to Malaysia as a country the Malaysian Prime Minister said that “given time we can recover”.
“I believe the world will look at us and judge us in a sense that it was hugely complex matter to deal with and I think on balance we did a lot of good things and one of the biggest things we did was to put together 26 nations in the largest ever search operation conducted during peace time and that’s a huge success for Malaysia.”
“Admittedly, we made some mistakes. There were shortcomings but the world must realize that this is totally unprecedented,” Najib said.
Source : http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2014/04/25/pm-investigation-on-mh370-will-be-made-public/
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