Flight MH370 Update: Special Tripartite Meeting This Week To Decide On Search, Debris Pieces Discovery

Malaysia will conduct a special tripartite meeting this week as the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 nears its deadline in July. The two-day meeting with Australia and China is set to decide on the future of the search for the Boeing 777-200, which went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.

The meeting, which will begin Monday, will also focus on details of the search, including the discovery of debris pieces in the last few months, Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Ab Aziz Kaprawi told local newspaper Bernama Saturday. The meeting is scheduled to take place at the transport ministry office in Putrajaya, south of Kuala Lumpur.

"Top of the agenda of the meeting is on the future direction of the search operation for MH370," Ab Aziz reportedly said. "Only high ranking officials will attend the meeting. Malaysia will be represented by Department of Civil Aviation Director-General Datuk Seri Azharuddin Abdul Rahman."

A multimillion-dollar search for the plane, which has been ongoing for over two years, has so far yielded no concrete clues as to what happened to the jet that went off radar while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Search vessels have so far scoured more than 40,540 square miles of the total search area of 46,332 square miles.

In April, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is leading the search for the plane, confirmed that two debris pieces — a segment of Boeing 777 engine cowling and an interior panel from the main cabin — found on the beaches in Mossel Bay, South Africa, and Rodrigues Island in Mauritius, were "almost certainly" from the missing plane. The agency also said two items from Mozambique, which were found on Dec. 27, 2015, and Feb. 27, 2016, provided almost irrefutable evidence that the parts were from the missing passenger plane.

The first piece belonging to Flight MH370 was found in July 2015 — a flaperon that turned up on the French-controlled Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.