BEIJING — Relatives of passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 are launching a crowd-funding campaign to raise a $3 million reward for a whistle-blower to expose key information about the vanished jetliner.
Almost three months after the plane disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, some relatives are frustrated by the failure of the official search to find concrete evidence about what happened. They are convinced that authorities are concealing the truth.
"We are taking matters into our own hands," said Sarah Bajc, a U.S. citizen whose partner, Philip Wood, 50, an IBM executive from Texas, was on the flight when it disappeared March 8. "There is no credible evidence the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean, where planes, boats and a mini-sub have searched in vain for weeks".
"I'm convinced that somebody is concealing something," said Bajc, 48, a business studies teacher in Beijing and former executive with Microsoft.
The campaign called "Reward MH370: The Search for the Truth" will launch on Monday on the crowd-funding website Indiegogo. The minimum donation will be $5.
The campaign is an initiative of family members from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, France and India and does not involve relatives of passengers from China or Malaysia, whose citizens formed the majority of those on the flight.
"2 million dollars in investigation services won't go very far," Bajc acknowledged. "But we're not going to approach it with boats in the ocean. We're going to approach it with human intelligence."
The relatives hope they turn up a whistle-blower who says, 'I know where to find this' or a flight controller who can access new data, but they expect they will also encounter some unethical people.
Bajc said "I don't care. I just want to find the plane. If there is any evidence that the plane was wrecked in the water, even a seat cushion, I will take a totally different approach. But right now there is nothing."
Australian transportation authorities will hire a specialist company to begin a renewed underwater search in a revised search zone in August. A Chinese ship is conducting underwater mapping of the ocean floor to assist the later search. The U.S. Navy's mini-sub Bluefin-21 is no longer being used.
edited from USA Today
