KUALA LUMPUR, March 26 — The urgency to announce new information placing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the middle of Indian Ocean left the flag carrier just a half hour to contact family members.

Speaking during an interview with British news service BBC, MAS chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the decision made the airline scramble to inform the relatives of the 239 people on board the missing plane before they learned the bad news through the media.

“Within 30 minutes, we had to be in touch with over 1,000 family members. We’re talking about different time zones, we’re talking about different languages, many different things,” he said during an interview with BBC’s Alastair Leithead published this morning.

A smirking Leithead had earlier asked the MAS chief of the heavily-criticised decision to use short messaging service (SMS) to contact family members on the evening of March 24 when Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak made the announcement.

“Our first priority was to inform them (the family members) personally; we tried to gather them in places where we could inform them, our call centres were actively trying to telephone them.

“We tried to reach them all before they heard it from the press,” he explained.

On Monday, the airlines told relatives that the people who flew on MH370 are believed to have died when the plane crashed, as investigators have concluded, into the Indian Ocean.

Yesterday, the airlines explained that the text messages were sent as a last resort after other efforts to get in touch with the related people were unsuccessful.

Family members were also livid at the airline’s message pronouncing all 239 on board MH370 as presumed dead, given the failure of search teams to find any physical evidence to support the conclusion that the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean.

“In incidents like this, there is always that little glimmer of hope that everybody wants to look forward to...” the MAS CEO noted.

In the interview with the BBC, Ahmad Jauhari pointed out that the ordeal has also been a taxing one for the MAS caregivers tasked with attending to the grieving families, saying they were also affected by the news.

The head of the Malaysian flag carrier also insisted that it has not withheld any information from the investigators, following recent accusations by families who believe the airline did not disclose all the information it had about the doomed flight.

On Monday evening, Najib announced that analysis by UK commercial satellite firm Inmarsat and the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) concluded that MH370 was south after it deviated from its flight to Beijing.

“It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” he said.

Search effort is now concentrated in a section of the Indian Ocean some 2,500km southwest of Perth in Western Australia where satellite images have spotted pieces of debris possibly from MH370, although recovery could still take years even if it is established that the plane went down at the location.