MH370: Malaysia PM visits Perth

Nearly a month after MH370 went missing, Prime Minister Abbott (pictured, left) told a news conference in Perth on Thursday that "he cannot be certain of success," calling the search "the most difficult in human history."

Abbott added that Australian authorities are "throwing everything we have" into the international search effort far off Australia's western coast.

"Every day, working on the basis of just small pieces of information, we are putting the jigsaw together," Abbott said. "And every day we have a higher degree of confidence that we know more about what happened to this ill-fated flight."

The Australian prime minister was visited by his Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak, in Australia's western port city of Perth on Thursday. Razak (pictured, right) vowed to the missing passengers' families that "we will not give up."

"We want to provide comfort to the families and we will not rest until answers are indeed found," he said. "In due time, we will provide a closure for this event."

Unsolved mystery

On Wednesday, Malaysian police said they had found no indications that any of the 239 passengers on board MH370 were involved in the aircraft's disappearance. General Khalid Abu Bakar, Malaysia's police chief, said the MH370 mystery may remain unsolved.

"At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause," Bakar said. "We may not even know the reason for this incident."

Planes and vessels from eight nations have been scouring an area of the Indian Ocean that is more than 220,000 square kilometers in size - nearly the size of Britain. So far, the search has not turned up any major leads. The search area is located in remote waters more than 1,600 kilometers northwest of Perth, the regional capital of the state of Western Australia.

Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

slk/ipj (AP, AFP, dpa)