REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, SYDNEY - The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines MASM.KL jetliner suffered a further setback on Thursday after Australian officials said wreckage from the aircraft was not on the seabed in the area they had identified.

Flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared from radar screens on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.

Investigators say what little evidence they have to work with, including the loss of communications, suggests the Boeing BA.N 777 was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometers from its scheduled route. The search was narrowed last month after a series of acoustic pings thought to be from the plane's black box recorders were heard near where analysis of satellite data put its last location, some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) off the northwest coast of Australia.

"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and, in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370," the agency in charge of the search said in a statement.

ATSB chief Martin Dolan told Reuters he expected the team to take two to three weeks to reassess and re-analyze the data, although he was "confident" that the final resting place of the aircraft was the Indian Ocean.

"We don't know what those pings were," Dolan said over the phone. "We are still analyzing those signals to understand them better."

The discovery of the pings on April 5 and 8 was hailed as a significant breakthrough, with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott expressing confidence that searchers knew where the plane wreckage was within a few kilometers.

However, a thorough scan of the 850 sq km area around the pings with an unmanned submarine failed to find any sign of wreckage. No debris linked to the plane has been picked up despite the most extensive and expensive search effort in aviation history.

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