Medan, Indonesia – Herlina Panjaitan has not changed her mobile phone number since her son, Firman Chandra Siregar, 25, disappeared 10 years ago.
Siregar, an Indonesian, was a passenger on MH370, the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared 40 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8, 2014 and was never heard from again.
For Panjaitan, 69, it is important that her number remains the same, just in case her youngest son tries to call her.
“That was the number I used at the time and that is the number Firman has for me. I still hope that he will call me and ask me to come pick him up, wherever he is,” he told Al Jazeera.
Panjaitan had traveled to Kuala Lumpur from his home in Medan, Indonesia, with his daughter-in-law and grandson the night before Siregar left for Beijing, so the family could spend some time together before he started his new job at a company. oil in China. .
Before leaving for the airport to catch the overnight flight, Panjaitan helped his son pack his belongings, including a bag full of warm clothes for Beijing's frigid winter.
The family took photos together, with Siregar smiling as he played with his nephew.
The paintings now hang on the wall of the family's home in Medan, which lies across the Strait of Malacca from Malaysia.
“I told him to be careful and call me when he got to Beijing,” Panjaitan said. “There was no feeling that anything was about to go wrong.”
The next morning, Panjaitan received a call from his daughter, who worked at the Indonesian embassy in Mexico, asking if he had heard the news about MH370.
“He just said he heard he had lost contact with air traffic control,” he recalled. “I didn't know what to think.”
Panjaitan and his family immediately rushed to Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), where the families of the 239 passengers and crew on board were informed about the plane's mysterious disappearance.
“That's when I started to believe it was really gone,” he said.
Ten years after it took off from KLIA, the plane's fate has become one of aviation's greatest mysteries.
No one has been able to say with certainty what happened to the Boeing 777 after Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah signed from Malaysian air traffic control with the words “Good evening, Malaysian three seven zero” and prepared to enter the airspace. Vietnamese.
According to satellite data, instead of continuing towards Beijing, the plane veered sharply off course, flying back through northern Malaysia and around Indonesia, before heading south towards the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.
Panjaitan said he called Siregar's mobile phone after hearing the news and it had rung several times but no one answered.
Two weeks later, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the plane had “finished” its journey in the remote southern Indian Ocean.
'The best boy'
Siregar, a graduate of Indonesia's prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, was the youngest of five siblings (three boys and two girls) and Panjaitan says he was “the best.”
“That doesn't mean my other kids aren't amazing,” she explained. “One works as a prosecutor and the other is a diplomat, but Firman was just the best kid and my other kids understand what I mean when I say that. He was so handsome, so polite, so respectful and so kind.
“He never gave me any trouble as a child and knew what to do and what not to do without me telling him.”
Before going to Beijing, Siregar had introduced his mother and family to his girlfriend and her parents, who had traveled from Bandung to meet Panjaitan and her husband Chrisman.
“They said they wanted to get married and I was happy that he had found his life partner,” she said.
Six months after the plane went missing, Panjaitan and her husband went to Bandung to meet Siregar's girlfriend and gave her their blessing to move on with her life.
“We said that if he wanted to get married in the future, he should do it,” Panjaitan told Al Jazeera. “She didn't say anything, she just cried. And we cried too, she was very sad.”
Many theories, few answers.
Endless speculation has filled the void left by the failure to find MH370.
Some claim that Captain Zaharie engineered a sophisticated murder-suicide plot to deliberately crash the plane into the ocean.
Others suggest that the plane was hijacked, deliberately shot down, or suffered a technical malfunction that cut off its communication systems and incapacitated the pilots, leading to its eventual crash.
None of the claims have been proven.
Searches have proven fruitless, including a major underwater and aerial search of an area of 120,000 square kilometers (46,332 square miles) that cost $147 million and was led by an Australian team along with Malaysia and China.
Malaysian authorities also launched several investigations that culminated in a 495-page report that was finally published in 2018. It concluded that while it was likely that a crime had been committed, it was not possible to say who was responsible.
Last week, ahead of the 10th anniversary, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim reiterated that Malaysia was willing to reopen an investigation if new evidence emerged.
Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke has also said he plans to meet with US marine robotics company Ocean Infinity to discuss a new underwater search proposal.
Panjaitan said his family welcomes any new investigation.
Some fragments of the plane have washed up on beaches in East Africa, including a flaperon that is part of the wing, but there has been nothing more substantial.
For Panjaitan that leaves room for hope.
“If it crashed, why didn't they find it? It's a huge plane. The important thing is that, alive or not, we still have hope that they will be found,” he stated.
“Hopefully Firman is alive and we can go pick him up wherever he is. When I see him again the first thing I will do is give him a big hug.”
