KUALA LUMPUR, April 7 — The latest lead in the international hunt for MH370, focussing on pings emitted by the missing Malaysian airliner’s black box is “more positive” than previous clues, Defence Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein said today.

“I’m more optimistic than some of the leads that we’ve had, so I would like everybody to continue to pray and this is something much more positive than others,” he told reporters here at the Royale Chulan Hotel.

“I’m very cautious about saying any more than that,” he  added.

During a press conference in Perth, Australia this morning,  Angus Houston, the retired Air Chief Marshal who heads the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in the search for the missing plane said that the so-called “black box finder” deployed from the Australian vessel, Ocean Shield, detected and maintained two signals for two significant periods.

The towed pinger locator deployed to find the black boxes from flight MH370 locked on to two separate signals believed to be from the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

Houston had said the first contact was maintained for two hours and twenty minutes before it was lost.

A second contact was detected and held after Ocean Shield turned around. The contact held for 13 minutes, he was reported as saying.

He pointed out that the two independent signals were especially encouraging as this was consistent with the two separate recorders that were on board the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Hishammuddin who is also the acting transport minister, was cautiously optimistic.

“There are still many steps to be taken before we can positively verify that these signals are from MH370.

“Despite all this, we are cautiously hopeful that there will be positive developments in the next few days,” he said.

The plane bound for Beijing, China in the early hours of March 8 fell off the Malaysian radar about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport but did not reappear on Vietnamese radar as expected.

The Boeing 777-200ER which was carrying 239 people “ended” in the Indian Ocean, according to Malaysia’s prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.

No debris has so far been found.

Search teams are racing against time to find the plane’s black box before its battery life ends.