Jamaica waives visa requirements for Chinese visitors

Australia’s Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said his department was working with the airline and Beijing to facilitate visas. Relatives would be given tourist visas with the usual fees waived, he said.

Mr Najib’s announcement opens the way for what will be one of the most costly and difficult air crash Wreckage could hold keyinvestigations ever.Normally, an official investigation can only begin once a crash site has been identified. That would give Malaysia power to co-ordinate and sift evidence.

A government source told Reuters that Malaysia would lead the investigation, but hoped other countries, especially Australia, would play a major role.The United States said it was sending an undersea Navy drone to Australia, in addition to a high-tech black box detector, to help in the search.But the black box detector would not arrive in the search area until April 5, Mr Hishammuddin said, leaving only a few days to pick up locator beacons from the box that stop about a month after a crash due to limited battery life.

The so-called black boxes ― the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder ― record what happens during flight.

Mr Najib said Mr Inmarsat had performed further calculations on data gleaned from faint pings picked up by satellite that initially only narrowed the search area to two massive arcs.

Giving more details on the analysis on Tuesday, Mr Hishammuddin said it showed that at some time after 00.11pm GMT ― about six hours after its last sighting by Malaysian military radar on March 8 ― the aircraft was no longer able to communicate with the ground station.

Wreckage could hold key

"This is a time of extraordinary emotions and we fully understand," said Malaysia Airlines Chairman Mohd Nur Yusof. "In fact, we really feel for the next of kin. In terms of how they react, it’s emotional." Asked whether he would resign over the crisis, the airline’s CE, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said that would be a "personal decision" to be made at a later time.

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after taking off on March 8. No confirmed debris from the plane has been found since.

Investigators believe someone on the flight may have shut off the plane’s communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

Recovery of wreckage could unlock clues about why the plane had diverted so far off course. Theories range from a hijacking to sabotage or a possible suicide by one of the pilots, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems.

As a result of the new satellite analysis, the international search effort has been narrowed to focus solely on the southern end of the possible route ― a still massive area of 1.2-million sq km ― Malaysian acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters.

The search site is far from commercial flight paths about 2,500km southwest of Perth, a region of deep, frigid seas known as the Roaring 40s where storm-force winds and huge waves are commonplace.

Malaysia Airlines said in a statement that it would make arrangements to fly relatives to Australia once it had approval from the investigating authorities.