KUALA LUMPUR, March 21 — Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott defended his decision to inform the country’s Parliament of satellite images possibly linked to a missing Malaysian plane, despite acknowledging that these may be of a discarded shipping container.

According to British daily The Guardian, Abbott said he made the decision to inform Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak after receiving “credible evidence” in the area where his country was searching for flight MH370.

“Since then, we’ve been throwing everything we’ve got at that area to try to learn more about what this debris might be. It could just be a container that’s fallen off a ship; we just don’t know,” Abbott, who is in Papua New Guinea, was quoted as saying in the report.

He said Australia owed the families of the 239 people onboard the missing flight a duty to do all it could to resolve what he described as an extraordinary puzzle.

“We owe it to them to do everything we can to resolve this and because of the understandable state of anxiety and apprehension that they’re in we also owe it to them to give them information as soon as it’s to hand and I think I was doing that yesterday in the parliament.”

Australian newspaper The Age also quoted the Australian PM as saying that the current search area for the missing aircraft is “the most inaccessible spot” on the planet. 

The possible sighting of plane debris from MH370 some 2,500km off the coast of Perth in Western Australia was announced yesterday by Abbott and was described by Malaysian authorities as a “credible lead”, but one that would take time to corroborate.

It is now the location of an intensified search led by Australia.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was headed for Beijing with 239 people when it lost contact with ground control at 1.22am on March 8.

It was initially thought to be lost somewhere over the South China Sea, where Malaysian air traffic controllers last registered the plane on their radar screens.

But Malaysia revealed a week later that the plane had flown west over the peninsula after it severed communications.

Authorities also concluded the flight deviation was most likely due to “deliberate action”.

Malaysia also revealed that satellite communication showed the plane was in one of two “corridors”: a northern arc from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in central Asia, or a southern one from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The Australian search is located in the southern “corridor”.