KUALA LUMPUR: Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad hopes the government can restart the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which disappeared nine years ago.
In a statement on Facebook in conjunction with the anniversary of the disappearance of MH370 today, the former prime minister said the victims' families however should at the same time accept that their loved ones might not be alive.
He said family members should be patient as the incident had already happened and this plane was indeed lost along with the passengers and the crew.
"Most probably they are no longer alive because when the plane is taken over by somebody else and flown to some other destination, the fate of the passengers is certainly going to be that of the plane.
"What happens to the plane, happens to the passengers," he said.
Dr Mahathir said until now no clues there had been no clues about what had happened to MH370 even though some parties said that the plane had crashed into the sea.
However, he said, there was no solid evidence to show that the plane crashed into the sea nor evidence that it landed anywhere or crashed to the ground.
He said this caused family members to be in a "disturbing" situation because they don't know what actually happened to their family, whether they were still alive or detained.
On March 8 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) en route to Beijing, China but disappeared from radar screens two hours later.
Following that, a large-scale search operation involving several countries was carried out in the southern Indian Ocean, but MH370 was never found.