'Miracles do happen' claims Malaysian minister as 'black box' is found beneath Indian Ocean: Ship's sonar repeatedly picks up signals consistent with voice and data recorder from missing flight



Australian official called the news 'a most promising lead'

Malaysian Defence Minister: 'We continue to hope and pray for survivors'



Could take days to verify signals picked up by Australia's Ocean Shield



British Navy's HMS Echo arrived in region 1,000 miles west of Australia



Three 'fleeting' sounds picked up 5.6 miles deep in southern Indian Ocean



Two pings detected within a small patch of 84,000-square-mile search zone

Batteries powering plane's black box are expected to run out imminently



Nine military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships are in search



A senior Malaysian official claimed 'miracles do happen' as it was revealed today that underwater sounds detected by a ship searching the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet are consistent with the pings from aircraft black boxes.



Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammudin Hussein told reporters that satellite information 'did not indicate or show survivors' but later added: 'We continue to hope and pray for survivors. We are just hoping against hope.'



Angus Houston, the head of a joint agency co-ordinating the search, warned that it could take days to confirm whether the signals picked up by the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield are indeed from the black boxes that belonged to Flight MH370, but called the discovery very encouraging.



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Angus Houston shows reporters in Perth where the Australian vessel Ocean Shield was located in the Indian Ocean when it detected pings believed to be from MH370's black box

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre leading the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, confirms authorities have detected signals consistent with a black box during a media conference in Perth today





Malaysian defence minister Hishammudin Hussein added: 'We are cautiously hopeful that there will be a positive development in the next few days, if not hours.'

He told a press conference: 'I have always said to the families miracles do happen.'



Asked if there was any chance of finding survivors from Flight MH370, he added: 'We continue to hope and pray for survivors.'



He said that all parties must be cautious about 'unconfirmed findings and making conclusions'.

'We have been through a real rollercoaster ride on some of the leads we have received. I am more optimistic about this one.'



There was little time left to locate the devices, which have beacons that emit 'pings' so they can be more easily found.

The beacons' batteries last only about a month - and Tuesday marks exactly one month since the plane disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Crew aboard the Australian Navy ship HMAS Success look over to the Royal Malaysian Navy ship KD LEKIU during a Replenishment at Sea evolution in the southern Indian Ocean during the continuing search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370

Arrived: The British Navy's HMS Echo has arrived to the spot 1,000 miles off Australia's coast to verify the findings

The Australian navy's Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the US navy, picked up two separate signals late on Saturday night and early on Sunday morning within a remote patch of the Indian Ocean far off the west Australian coast that search crews have been criss-crossing for weeks

The Australian navy's Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the US navy, picked up two separate signals late on Saturday night and early on Sunday morning within a remote patch of the Indian Ocean far off the west Australian coast that search crews have been criss-crossing for weeks.



The first signal lasted two hours and 20 minutes before it was lost. The ship then turned around and picked up a signal again - this time recording two distinct 'pinger returns' that lasted 13 minutes, Mr Houston said.

'Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,' Mr Houston said.

Still, Mr Houston cautioned that it was too early to say the transmissions were coming from the missing jet.

'I would want more confirmation before we say this is it,' he said. 'Without wreckage, we can't say it's definitely here. We've got to go down and have a look.'

A Chinese Ilyushin IL-76s aircraft at Perth international airport shortly before joining the search operation

The airliner's black boxes normally emit a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz, and the signals picked up by the Ocean Shield were both 33.3 kilohertz, said US navy captain Mark Matthews. But officials contacted the device's manufacturer and were told the frequency of black boxes can drift near the end of their shelf lives.

The Ocean Shield was slowly canvassing a small area trying to find the signal again, though that could take another day, Mr Matthews said.

'It's like playing hot and cold when you're searching for something and someone's telling you you're getting warmer and warmer and warmer,' he said.



'When you're right on top of it you get a good return.'

VIDEO: Bluefin-21, The robot searching for missing flight MH-370

If they pick up the signal again, the crew will launch an underwater vehicle to investigate, Mr Matthews said.



The Bluefin-21 autonomous sub can create a sonar map of the area to chart where the debris may lie on the sea floor.



If it maps out a debris field, the crew will replace the sonar system with a camera unit to photograph any wreckage.

But that may prove tricky, given that the sub can only dive to about 4,500 metres (14,800 feet) - the approximate depth of the water.



That means the vehicle will be operating to the limits of its capability.

Given the difficulties involved, officials warned the mystery of Flight MH370 would still take time to resolve.

'It could take some days before the information is available to establish whether these detections can be confirmed as being from MH370,' Mr Houston said. 'In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast.'

Geoff Dell, discipline leader of accident investigation at Central Queensland University in Australia, said it would be 'coincidental in the extreme' for the sounds to have come from anything other than an aircraft's black box.

The towed pinger locator (TPL-25) on the deck of Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield - which may have detected a signal from the plane's black box

'If they have got a legitimate signal, and it's not from one of the other vessels or something, you would have to say they are within a bull's roar,' he said.

'There's still a chance that it's a spurious signal that's coming from somewhere else and they are chasing a ghost, but it certainly is encouraging that they've found something to suggest they are in the right spot.'

Meanwhile, the British ship HMS Echo was using sophisticated sound-locating equipment to try to determine whether two separate sounds heard by a Chinese ship about 555 kilometres (345 miles) away from the Ocean Shield were related to the plane.



The patrol vessel Haixun 01 detected a brief 'pulse signal' on Friday and a second signal on Saturday.

A member of a Chinese search team - who have detected two of the pings so far - uses an instrument to detect electronic pulses during the search

The towed pinger locator is deployed off the Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield - the vessel which picked up the third 'ping' on Sunday

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is leading the search for missing MH370, said today three separate sounds detected from deep in the Indian Ocean were an 'important and encouraging lead'

The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small boat - something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.



The equipment aboard the British and Australian ships is dragged slowly behind each vessel over long distances and is considered far more sophisticated.

The search effort was also continuing on the ocean surface on Monday. Twelve planes and 14 ships were searching three designated zones, one of which overlaps with the Ocean Shield's underwater search.

All of the previous surface searches have found only fishing equipment or other sea rubbish floating in the water, but have found no debris related to the Malaysian plane.

A new report suggesting that the missing flight MH370 deliberately circled around Indonesian air space after it vanished appears to lend credibility to an earlier claim that the jet was hijacked.



CNN reported that it had been told that the Boeing 777 might have flown around Indonesian air space on the night it vanished in what could have been a deliberate attempt to avoid radar detection.



That new report tends to support an anonymous email received by the Daily Mail last week - from what is believed to be a Malaysian government source - in which it was claimed that the aircraft had been hijacked and the pilots were told to circle around an area 'near Malaysia' while negotiations with the hijackers were carried out.



According to the email received by the Mail the hijackers demanded that a five year jail sentence imposed on Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim be lifted - and while negotiations were being carried out the plane was ordered to fly around near Malaysia and Indonesia for five hours.

A S-70B-2 Seahawk (Tiger 75) helicopter makes an approach to the flight deck of an Australian Navy ship during the search. The Malaysian Airlines flight disappeared on March 8

An image showing a piece of white debris which was spotted by Chinese air force in the southern Indian Ocean yesterday close to where they heard the 'pings' believed to be from the black box

A Royal New Zealand Air Force Orion aircraft prepares to take off from an air base. Those aboard will help look for any debris from the plane

Although the email cannot be verified and the claimed government source has not been identified, its contents tend to fit in with separate information now received by CNN.

The writer, who corresponded in Chinese, said in the translation that if an agreement was reached for the jail sentence to be lifted, the aircraft would be allowed to land safely.



But if, after five hours no agreement was reached, 'the plane will be destroyed'.



The source said in the email that although the aircraft's main communication system had been closed down, negotiations continued through what the writer said was an 'internal communication channel.'



According to the source, the government took five hours to declare the loss of the plane because that was when the negotiation time ran out and when officials realised the aircraft could not stay in the air any longer.



During those five hours, said the writer, 'the plane was always flying around the Malaysian area.'



The Boeing company said later that the jet would have been able to stay in the air for a few hours more than the five hours referred to in the email.



Although both the CNN report and the email received by the Mail have come from unidentified sources, the claims in both tend to agree on one major point - that MH370 circled around the Malaysian-Indonesian area before, as pings from the bottom of the sea suggest, it finally flew out into the Indian Ocean where it ran out of fuel.

He said that China also reported seeing white objects floating in the sea 55 miles from where the ping was detected.

The movements of every passenger and crew member in the hours before the ill-fated MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur have been examined by detectives sifting through CCTV cameras mounted at the airport and on the nearby motorway.



They have examined the faces of passengers and crew passing through an automatic toll point near the airport and have watched security footage of all passengers as they strolled around the airport prior to taking off on the scheduled flight to Beijing.

A New Zealand Air Force crew member looks out for debris from the Malaysia Airlines plane during the search last week

People hold LED candles during a mass prayer for the missing plane in Kuala Lumpu today A woman places a blessing light on a dedication to flight MH370 during the service

A man writes a message for those lost in the crash. Those in charge of the search continue to stress the detected signals are not yet verified

The examinations has been so detailed that detectives have been able to follow the movements of two Iranians who, it was established later, had checked in using passports stolen in Thailand.



While background checks on the two men suggest they were planning to start new lives in Europe, using a popular 'human smuggling route' through Malaysia, their movements might suggest they were up to more sinister activities.



Investigators combing through the CCTV recordings first spotted the two men passing through a toll gate in separate vehicles, the Sunday edition of Malaysia's New Straits Times reported today.



One was travelling in a taxi while the other was travelling in a private car, a source was quoted as telling the newspaper.



The cars stopped near each other at the airport and then the two men walked in the same direction, but separately.



'They were trying hard to appear as if they didn't know each other at the airport. It was only much later that they pretended to bump into each other and shook hands, but after that they again kept a distance from each other. They were very calm throughout,' said the quoted source.



The source told the paper: 'Their hands were glued to their phones, texting non-stop...it appeared as though they were taking instructions from someone.'

A woman takes part in a special prayer for those missing aboard the flight. Investigators believe the flight veered off course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean

Buddhist monks write messages on a special dedication board ahead of the mass prayer

It was hooked up by cords to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.

'If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,' said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com.



'Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it's an extraordinarily lucky break.'





