The White House said on Thursday that the hunt for the missing Boeing airliner could shift into the Indian Ocean as the Malaysian authorities admitted they had made little progress.
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said that “an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean” as a result of “new information”, although he gave no details about the nature of the lead and added that it might not be conclusive.
The US Navy said that one of the two ships that had been searching for the plane in the Gulf of Thailand, the USS Kidd, was now moving west to the Malacca Strait while India said that it was sending ships and aircraft based in the Andaman Sea to take part in the search.