KUALA LUMPUR, May 14 — Putrajaya must explain to Parliament the full details of MH370’s disappearance and the subsequent international search mission that followed, including how much it cost, DAP’s Liew Chin Tong said today.
The Kluang MP said a parliamentary white paper on the incident should soon be tabled, especially since acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein announced earlier today that he will be preparing a Cabinet note together with the Defence Ministry and the Foreign Office.
“The government must be more open about what actually went wrong on the fateful day of 8th March and how not to allow such incident to recur,” Liew said in a statement here.
“A more candid and transparent approach will help revive confidence in Malaysian institutions.”
The DAP National Political Education Director also urged Putrajaya to undertake a study to ensure that the tragedy does not occur again in the future.
He said that the white paper is even more important now after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak's admitted in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Putrajaya did not “get everything right”.
Describing the loss of the MH370 as “one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries”, Najib acknowledged in his opinion piece that the lack of physical proof of the plane’s fate and a “clear explanation” of why the tragedy occurred had resulted in Malaysia facing the bulk of criticism for the aircraft’s disappearance.
But he insisted that it had been “no small feat” for Malaysia to pull together 26 countries in the international search for the plane.
Liew also claimed that it is necessary to account for its search cost, after Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey announced in the country’s budget yesterday that A$90 million (RM270 million) has been allocated to search for MH370 in the next two years.
The MP also repeated the call for a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to probe the incident.
Pakatan Rakyat (PR) has consistently demanded for the PSC since the jetliner’s disappearance, and insisted that its leaders should spearhead the probe.
More than two months after the Beijing-bound MH370 disappeared, a search in the southern Indian Ocean is still going on with no wreckage of the plane found so far.
