SEPANG, March 9 — Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein confirmed today that an oil slick was found in Vietnam waters where the missing Malaysia Airlines plane was last located, but added that no debris had been sighted yet.

“I can confirm that there was an oil slick, no debris.

“I was told the Vietnamese aircrafts are on site right now to verify what is on the surface of those waters,” the minister told reporters at the Sama Sama Hotel here.

According a New York Times’ report from Hong Kong yesterday, the 19.3km-long oil slick could be the first sign that the Boeing B777-200 aircraft carrying 239 people had indeed gone down in the sea off the coast of Vietnam.

“An AN26 aircraft of the Vietnam Navy has discovered an oil slick about 20 kilometers in the search area, which is suspected of being a crashed Boeing aircraft — we have announced that information to Singapore and Malaysia and we continue the search,” Lai Xuan Thanh, the director of the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam was reported as saying in the news report.

Thanh reportedly said the oil slick looked closer to Vietnam than it did to Malaysia.

It has been over 38 hours since the plane last communicated with the Subang Air Traffic Control, and many continue to speculate the plane has crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, some 250km south of Vietnam.

The last coordinates where the aircraft was last heard at 1.30am yesterday morning from puts it somewhere 120 nautical miles off Kota Baru.

The Beijing-bound aircraft was carrying 239 passengers onboard, including 12 crew members and two infants.

A joint military effort involving Malaysia, Indonesia, the US, China and Thailand is currently underway to locate the missing airship.

An aerial view of an oil spill is seen from a Vietnamese Air Force aircraft in the search area for a missing Malaysia Airlines plane, 250km from Vietnam and 190km from Malaysia, March 9, 2014. — Reuters pic