Brothers file maiden negligence suit against MAS, Putrajaya over dad’s death

KUALA LUMPUR – Two boys today (Oct 31) filed a civil suit against Malaysia Airlines System Berhad (MAS) and four others over the loss of their father who was on board the still missing Flight MH370.

The boys, 13, and 11, are seeking damages for the loss of support with the disappearance of their father, Jee Jing Hang, who was a passenger of the missing jetliner.

Lead counsel Datuk Dr Arunan Selvaraj said while MAS and the authorities are doing all they can to find the plane, there is no one who is taking responsibility for the plane’s disappearance.

“We are talking about what has happened in the past. Who is going to be responsible? Nobody is coming forward and saying they are responsible,” he told journalists after filing the suit at the Kuala Lumpur High Court.

The suit is believed to be the first to be filed so far in Malaysia over the mysterious MH370 incident, which the authorities are still investigating.

Apart from MAS, the boys named the director-general of the Department of Civil Aviation, the Immigration Department director-general, the Royal Malaysian Air Force chief and the federal government as respondents.

The boys are seeking damages for the loss of support of their father, aggravated damages for injured feelings and emotions, mental distress and pain, and exemplary damages for gross neglect and breach of duty by the defendants.

Dr Arunan said today the matter is not only limited to what the next-of-kin of the passengers on board flight MH370 have gone through, but also what the passengers themselves would have expected of the authorities.

“Ask yourself, if you were a passenger, how would you feel? Don’t you think you want accountability?

“Don’t you want someone to be responsible? That’s what we want at the end of the day,” he said.

The first of the expected torrent of lawsuits over the tragedy started taking shape in the United States by Chicago-based law firm Ribbeck Law in March, just a few weeks after the Boeing 777 jetliner went missing.

At that time, many relatives of the plane’s Malaysian victims considered the move premature, saying they wanted to allow investigators more time to search for the missing plane and that without hard evidence of a crash, they would not mount a lawsuit.

It, however, has been nearly nine months since MH370’s mysterious disappearance and still there has been no sign of the jumbo passenger jet.

Searchers have been relying on the flight’s radar tracks and cryptic electronic conversations between the aircraft and satellite communications firms, which have indicated that MH370 mysteriously diverted off its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing towards the southern Indian Ocean, an area more than a thousand miles southwest of the coast of Perth in Australia.

But adding to the already arduous search is the lack of a single shred of physical evidence to prove the Boeing 777 jetliner had indeed downed in that particular part of the world shortly after it left Malaysian shores in the early morning of March 8. THE MALAY MAIL ONLINE