Beijing: A senior Chinese aviation official said on Thursday that the authorities could not confirm any link between the floating objects captured on Chinese satellite images to a Malaysia Airlines jet missing for more than five days.
"It is true that the satellite was launched and detected some smoke and what were suspected metal shreds about 37 kilometers (23 miles) southwest of Ho Chi Minh City," said Li Jiaxiang, chief of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. "But after some review, we cannot confirm that they belong to the missing plane."
The three objects of varying sizes were spotted in the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam and east of Malaysia on Sunday morning.
This comes after a Chinese science and defense agency said that murky satellite images may show debris from the missing Malaysian Airlines jetliner provided a fresh clue in the search for the plane, pointing searchers to a location nearer to the plane's original flight path south of Vietnam.
The revelation could have provided searchers with a focus that has eluded them since the plane disappeared with 239 people aboard just hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur for Beijing early Saturday. Since then, the search has covered 35,800 square miles (92,600 square kilometers), first east and then west of Malaysia and even expanded toward India on Wednesday.
The Chinese sighting, if confirmed, would be closer to where the frantic hunt started.
The Xinhua report said the images from around 11 am on Sunday appear to show "three suspected floating objects" of varying sizes in a 20-kilometer radius, the largest about 24-by-22 meters (79-by-72 feet).
The images originally were posted on the website of China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. That site reports coordinates of a location in the sea off the southern tip of Vietnam and east of Malaysia.
No other governments have confirmed the Xinhua report, which did not say when Chinese officials became aware of the images and associated them with the missing plane.
Two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese, and the Chinese government has put increasing pressure on Malaysian officials to solve the mystery of the plane's disappearance.
On Wednesday, it was revealed that the last message from the cockpit of the missing flight was routine. "All right, good night," was the signoff transmitted to air traffic controllers five days ago.
Then the Boeing 777 vanished as it cruised over the South China Sea toward Vietnam, and nothing has been seen or heard of the jetliner since.
Those final words were picked up by controllers and relayed in Beijing to anguished relatives of some of the people aboard Flight MH370.
The Chinese reports of the satellite images came after several days of confusing and conflicting statements from Malaysian officials.
Earlier Wednesday, the Malaysian military officially disclosed why it was searching on both sides of country: A review of military radar records showed what might have been the plane turning back and crossing westward into the Strait of Malacca.
That would conflict with the latest images on the Chinese website.
For now, authorities said the international search effort would stay focused on the South China Sea and the strait leading toward the Andaman Sea.
The plane carrying 239 people went missing Saturday morning while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
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