MH370 lawyers granted two-week extension to file defence
KUALA LUMPUR — The defence team for the first civil suit filed in Malaysia over the missing MH370 was granted a two-week extension to file for its defence, according to the lawyer for the applicants.
KUALA LUMPUR — The defence team for the first civil suit filed in Malaysia over the missing MH370 was granted a two-week extension to file for its defence, according to the lawyer for the applicants.
Dr Arunan Selvaraj, the lead counsel for the two boys who had last month filed a civil suit against Malaysia Airlines MAS and four others over the loss of their father who was on board the still missing Boeing 777 jetliner, said the defence team is expected to file by Dec 15.
“The registrar also set January 15 for the case management in front of a judge,” he told Malay Mail Online after the case management in front of the registrar this morning.
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. They are also seeking aggravated damages for injured feelings and emotions, mental distress and pain, and exemplary damages for gross neglect and breach of duty by the defendants.
Apart from MAS, the boys also 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 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.
But after nine months since MH370’s mysterious disappearance, there’s still is 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 gone down in that particular part of the world shortly after it left Malaysian shores in the early morning of March 8. THE MALAY MAIL ONLINE