Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 remains missing, and now the first lawyer to file a legal petition on behalf of a passenger's family is being investigated by an ethics committee.
ABC News reported that Chicago lawyer Monica Ribbeck Kelly filed the suit against Malaysia Airlines and Boeing on behalf of 25-year-old Indonesian passenger Firman Siregar the day after Malaysia’s prime minister told reporters the plane was lost and there were no survivors.
Shortly thereafter, Siregar's parents said in a letter to the Indonesian Embassy in Malaysia that the man named in the lawsuit as the passenger's father was in reality a distant relative, and that they did not endorse the filing.
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Last week, Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Committee filed a complaint against Kelly, writing that her allegations that there was a mechanical malfunction, that the aircraft had crashed, and that Siregar had been killed, were baseless because the plane remains missing.
In response, she told ABC News, "We have been filing these petitions for 15 years. I have no idea why the ARDC filed a complaint against me since the case is pending before the appellate court."
Kelly's attorney said she filed the suit in "good faith" and added, "Somebody wasn’t doing what they were supposed to or some machine on the airplane wasn’t operating correctly. By her discovery petition, [Kelly] seeks to find out who were the manufacturers of the various components of this aircraft so that she can make inquiry of those who might have evidence that could explain this."
Kelly's hearing with the ARDC is scheduled for August 26.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss announced Wednesday that Dutch oil-and-gas consulting firm Fugro will lead a new search starting in early September to locate the missing plane.
"I remain cautiously optimistic that we will locate the missing aircraft within the priority search area, but this search will obviously be a challenging one" Truss said, referring to the priority search zone, a 20,000-square-mile area in the southern Indian Ocean.
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