A Beijing court ordered Malaysia Airlines to pay 2.9 million yuan (€350,000) to each of eight families whose relatives disappeared on flight MH370 more than a decade ago, according to a court statement released on Monday.
The compensation covers the loss of life, funeral costs and emotional distress damages. The passengers have been declared legally dead, though their fate remains unknown.
Another 23 cases are pending, while 47 other families reached settlements with the airline and withdrew their lawsuits, the court said.
The ruling comes less than a week after Malaysian authorities announced plans to resume searching for the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean starting 30 December.
Flight MH370 vanished on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, including 227 passengers — most of them Chinese — and 12 crew members.
The Boeing 777 disappeared from air traffic control radar 39 minutes after takeoff. The pilot’s final radio transmission — “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero” — came as the plane prepared to enter Vietnamese airspace, but it never checked in with Vietnamese controllers.
The aircraft’s transponder, which broadcasts location data, stopped functioning minutes later. Military radar tracked the jet turning back over the Andaman Sea, and satellite data indicated it continued flying for hours, possibly until fuel exhaustion, before crashing into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean.
Despite extensive international search operations over the past decade, investigators have been unable to determine why the plane went down or what happened to those aboard.
Passengers included five children and citizens from the United States, Indonesia, France, Russia and other countries.