LATEST UPDATE: US FBI Director James Comey told a House of Representatives subcommittee on Wednesday he expects his agency to finish an investigation of computer files related to the missing Malaysia Airlines flight in the next one or two days.
Comey, who was testifying before an appropriations subcommittee on the FBI's 2015 budget request, said Malaysian authorities gave the FBI forensic computer materials and that the agency's review of those materials is nearly complete.
"I have teams working really around the clock to exploit that," Comey said. "I don't want to say more about that in an open setting, but I expect it to be done fairly shortly. Within a day or two we will finish that work."
Comey did not say what results he expected from the FBI's analysis. He also denied allegations that Malaysian authorities had not been open to assistance offered by the FBI in the investigation of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which has been missing for over two weeks.
US law firm launches legal action
A US law firm said on Wednesday it has initiated what it called the first civil legal proceedings over the crash of flight MH370 and said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking "millions of dollars" for aggrieved families.
Chicago-based Ribbeck Law Chartered said it filed a court petition in the US state of Illinois targeting Malaysia Airlines and Boeing, blaming the two companies for the disaster.
"We are going to be filing the lawsuits for millions of dollars per each passenger based on prior cases that we have done involving crashes like this one," its head of aviation litigation, Monica Kelly, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.
The development appeared to mark the start of what legal experts have warned could be a cascade of lawsuits by passengers' relatives livid over the unexplained disappearance of their loved ones.
The plane carried 239 passengers and crew.
Kelly said her firm was also talking to several other relatives in China and Malaysia about taking similar action.
Ribbeck in a statement said it had filed a "petition of discovery" in Illinois requesting a court to order defendants to provide potential evidence and other information.
Malaysia Airlines, Boeing blamed
In particular, the documents being sought pertain to possible design or mechanical defects or conduct by the airline that may have led to the disaster, it said.
"We believe that both defendants named are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370," the statement said.
The legal action was filed on behalf of Januari Siregar, an Indonesian lawyer and father of Firman Chandra Siregar, 25, who was on the flight.
"I seek justice for my son and all of the people who lost their lives in the crash," Januari Siregar was quoted in the statement as saying.
"All of the families of the victims want to know the truth and causes of this tragedy, same mistakes must be avoided in the future and those responsible must be brought to court."
Boeing and Malaysia Airlines have 30 days to reply, Kelly told reporters, adding that a lawsuit could take years to settle.
Kelly said Malaysia Airlines' policy with German insurer Allianz was worth more than $1.5 billion.
Ground contact with the Beijing-bound flight was lost somewhere over the Gulf of Thailand, shortly after it took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8.
Malaysia believes it was deliberately diverted. It said Monday that satellite data indicates the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from its original path.
But no wreckage has been found there despite several days of searching by a fleet of ships and planes, and no other evidence has publicly emerged to indicate what caused the plane to divert.
Airline's liability 'almost certain'
Floyd Wisner, another US-based aviation crash attorney, said Malaysia Airlines' liability was "almost certain, no matter what the cause of the crash ultimately is determined to be".
"The fact that the wreckage has not yet been found does not have any real legal impact upon the families' claims against Malaysia Airlines," he told AFP.
However, other lawyers said lawsuits could be bogged down by the lack of evidence.
Many of the next-of-kin of MH370 passengers, particularly Chinese relatives, have been frustrated with the lack of information and angrily accuse the flag carrier and the Malaysian government of incompetence and withholding evidence.
Two-thirds of the 227 passengers were Chinese.
Kelly said her firm believed equipment failure caused a fire or sudden loss of pressure that rendered the pilots unconscious and "a ghost plane" flew for several hours until it ran out of fuel.
Malaysia Airlines said in a statement its lawyers had been advised of the court action, but declined further comment.
Boeing did not immediately return a request for comment.
The national flag carrier has already paid $5,000 to next-of-kin, but they are entitled to up to about $176,000 under an international convention.
Satellite images show 122 potential objects
Fresh satellite images taken during the search for a missing passenger jet show 122 "potential objects" in one area of the Indian Ocean, Malaysia said Wednesday.
The images from Airbus Defence and Space in France show the objects in a 400 sq km area of the ocean, said Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.
Hishammuddin told a daily press conference it was not possible to say whether the objects came from the Boeing 777 which crashed on March 8 with 239 people aboard.
"Nevertheless, this is another new lead that will help direct the search operation," he said.
Earlier satellite data from Australia, China and France had also shown floating objects possibly related to MH370, but nothing has so far been retrieved despite a huge multinational search.
Hishammuddin said the Airbus images were taken on Sunday, received Tuesday, and immediately forwarded to the Australian agency coordinating the search.
He said the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency had identified the 122 "potential objects" after analysing the satellite images.
Some were a metre in length while others were as long as 23 metres.
"Some of the objects appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials," the minister said.
They were located about 2,557 km from Perth. The search effort has focused on waters far to the southwest of Australia.
Australia says three more objects seen
Australian authorities said on Wednesday that three more objects had been spotted by aircraft searching for a Malaysian jet missing in the southern Indian Ocean.
A civilian aircraft, one of 12 scouring the region some 2,500km southwest of Perth, had seen two objects thought to be rope, while a New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion spotted a blue object, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on its Twitter feed.
None was seen again on subsequent passes and none was distinctive of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, ASMA added.
Theories continue to abound - some plausible, some crazy... but all without hope
Satellite data that confirmed a Malaysian jetliner missing for more than two weeks crashed in the Indian Ocean included a final electronic signal that is still being investigated, Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Tuesday.
"There is evidence of a partial handshake between the aircraft and ground station at 0019 UTC (GMT)," Hishammuddin told a news conference.
"At this time, this transmission is not understood and is subject to further ongoing work."
Preliminary analysis of the satellite "pings" had only been able to place the plane's final position in one of two vast arcs stretching from the Caspian Sea to the southern Indian Ocean.
Aviation's greatest mystery
Even if searchers are able to miraculously pluck Malaysia Airlines flight 370's "black box" from the depths of the vast Indian Ocean, experts say it may not solve one of aviation's greatest mysteries.
Planes, ships and state-of-the-art tracking equipment are hunting for any trace of the passenger jet, which Malaysia said crashed in the forbidding waters after veering far from its intended course.
They face a huge challenge locating the Boeing 777's "black box", which holds vital clues to determining what caused the plane to vanish after it took off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8.
But experts believe the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder may not yield answers on the riddle of how and why the plane diverted an hour into the flight, and embarked on a baffling journey to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.
The data recorder details the aircraft's path and other mechanical information for the flight's duration, and "should provide a wealth of information", US-based aviation consultancy firm Leeham Co said in a commentary.
But the cockpit voice recorder - which could reveal what decisions were made by those at the helm and why - retains only the last two hours of conversations before the plane's demise.
That means potentially crucial exchanges surrounding the initial diversion, which took place halfway between Malaysia and Vietnam, will be lost.
"Clearly, it won't reveal anything that happened over the Gulf of Thailand - this will have been overwritten by the end of MH370," it said.
Leeham added that it also remains to be seen whether the cockpit recorder will contain anything pertinent about the plane's final two hours, when it is believed to have either ditched or run out of fuel.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that Flight MH370 had gone down in the Indian Ocean with its 239 passengers and crew, citing new satellite data analysis.
But its exact location and the circumstances of its diversion remain a mystery. No distress signal was ever received.
The possible theories
Three scenarios have gained particular traction: hijacking, pilot sabotage, or a sudden mid-air crisis that incapacitated flight crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot for several hours until it ran out of fuel.
Malaysia has said it believes the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board.
But with the travelling public and aviation industry hanging on every twist in the drama, no firm evidence has emerged from a Malaysian investigation to support any of the theories circulating.
British aviation expert Chris Yates said that even if the black boxes are found, "it seems unlikely that we will get that answer" of why the plane ended up thousands of kilometres off course.
"We still have no idea as to the mental state of the pilot and co-pilot, we have no idea if somebody managed to get into the cockpit to seize the aircraft, and we've certainly had no admissions of responsibility since this whole episode started," he told BBC television.
"It is a mystery like no other."
Debris has been sighted far off Australia's west coast but an international search effort has been unable to retrieve any for confirmation, and wreckage could have drifted hundreds of kilometres from where the plane crashed.
"As investigators, we deal with physical evidence and right now we don't have any physical evidence to work with," Anthony Brickhouse, a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, told AFP.
The batteries powering the locator signal of the black boxes will run out in less than two weeks.
A US device capable of detecting that signal even on the ocean floor was being sent to the scene, but weather and treacherous sea conditions have hampered the effort to pinpoint the black box location.
Paul Yap, an aviation lecturer at Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic, said that if the black box is not found, "chances are we are never going to find out what really happened".
"With the new satellite data, I think we can say it is a chessboard," he said of the wide search area.
"The question now is to find which grid on that chessboard to focus on, where the black boxes are."
And now for some of the truly outlandish theories floating about....
Pitbull-Shakira
A 2012 Pitbull-Shakira song, Get It Started has been thrown into the mix.
The lyrics No Ali/No freezer/But for now, off to Malaysia were perceived to have been prophetic, seeing as ‘Mr Ali’ was the nickname given by the British media to one of the Iranian passengers with a fake passport.
Cloaking device
There were 20 employees of Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor on board and It seemed that there was a cloaking device involved, one created by the company and coveted by China.
Star Wars weapon
As per Natural News:."The frightening part about all this is not that we will find the debris of Flight 370; but rather that we won't."
"If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence. If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power."
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