Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Prime Minister Najeeb Razak has told families of passengers of a missing Malaysian airliner that the plane ended its journey in the southern Indian Ocean, he said on Monday.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after take-off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8.

The news comes as a Chinese aircraft, Australian fuel supply ship and an Australian aircraft each found objects floating in the sea on Monday, Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussain, said on Monday afternoon in Kuala Lumpur.

None could be verified by other searchers, but the Australian ship HMAS Success, whose radar detected a pair of objects, “is in the vicinity, and it’s possible the objects could be received within the next few hours, or by tomorrow morning at the latest,” Hussain said.

The Australian aircraft saw two objects, “one circular and one rectangular,” Hussain said. The Chinese aircraft saw “two relatively big floating objects with many white smaller ones scattered within a radius of several kilometres,” China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. Hussain said “two orange objects approximately one metre in length and one white-coloured drum” were also spotted.

In Australia, prime minister Tony Abbott said Japanese, Australian and US aircraft were all in the search area, and cautioned about how little remains known.

Malaysian authorities also noted that the missing plane was carrying wooden pallets, potentially a hopeful sign after wreckage that looked like a wooden pallet was found spotted by a search aircraft on Sunday.

The number of new sightings is in part a reflection of the number of resources devoted to the search, which on Monday included 10 aircraft flying some 2,500 kilometres southwest of Australia to look for the vanished flight 370. The Boeing 777 with 239 people on board disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Military radar suggests it took a sharp turn south about 40 minutes after takeoff. It appears to have been deliberately diverted, although no one knows why. CNN on Sunday reported that the aircraft appears to have immediately dived to 12,000 feet from its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, suggesting the pilots may have been responding to an emergency on board.

However, no distress call was made, and seven hours of continued satellite communication from the aircraft have shrouded the flight’s fate in a mystery that has defied explanation for more than two weeks now.

The massive effort to find the aircraft has called on 26 nations, with Japan on Monday sending two aircraft to Australia, and the United Arab Emirates another. The US has also diverted a so-called “black box locator” to Australia. The device can be towed behind a ship to listen to pings from an airplane’s flight voice and data recorders.

Attention and resources in the search for the Boeing 777 have shifted from an initial focus north of the Equator to an increasingly narrowed stretch of rough sea in the southern Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the original flight path.

Beijing responded cautiously to the latest find. “At present, we cannot yet confirm that the floating objects are connected with the missing plane,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a news briefing in Beijing.

China has diverted its icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, toward the location where the debris was spotted. A flotilla of other Chinese ships are also steadily making their way south. The ships will start to arrive in the area on Tuesday.

Over 150 of the passengers on board the missing plane were Chinese.

The Chinese aircraft that spotted the objects was one of two IL-76s searching early on Monday. Another eight aircraft, from New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Japan, were scheduled to make flights throughout the day to the search site, some 2,500 Aircraft flying on Monday were focused on searching by sight, rather than radar, which can be tricky to use because of the high seas and wind in the area.

“It’s a lot of water to look for just perhaps a tiny object,” Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told Australian Broadcasting Corp. Radio before the Chinese report.

“Today we expect the weather to deteriorate and the forecast ahead is not that good, so it’s going to be a challenge, but we will stick at it,” he said.

Australia was also analysing French radar images showing potential floating debris that were taken some 850 km north of the current search area.

Australia has used a US satellite image of two floating objects to frame its search area. A Chinese satellite has also spotted an object floating in the ocean there, estimated at 22 metres long and 13 metres wide.

It could not be determined easily from the blurred images whether the objects were the same as those detected by the Australian and Chinese search planes, but the Chinese photograph could depict a cluster of smaller objects, said a senior military officer from one of the 26 nations involved in the search.

The wing of a Boeing 777-200ER is approximately 27 metres long and 14 metres wide at its base, according to estimates derived from publicly available scale drawings. Its fuselage is 63.7 metres long by 6.2 metres wide.

NASA said it would use high-resolution cameras aboard satellites and the International Space Station to look for possible crash sites in the Indian Ocean. The US space agency is also examining archived images collected by instruments on its Terra and Aqua environmental satellites.

Investigators believe someone on the flight shut off the plane’s communications systems. Partial military radar tracking showed it turning west and re-crossing the Malay Peninsula, apparently under the control of a skilled pilot.

That has led them to focus on hijacking or sabotage, but investigators have not ruled out technical problems. Faint electronic “pings” detected by a commercial satellite suggested it flew for another six hours or so, but could do no better than place its final signal on one of two vast arcs north and south.

While the southern arc is now the main focus of the search, Malaysia says efforts will continue in both corridors until confirmed debris are found.