The Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information had demanded that the misinformation about Vietnam contained in the British docuseries about missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 be removed.
In response, Netflix removed the entire first episode of the three-part series on Thursday afternoon from its platform in Vietnam, head of the department, Le Quang Tu Do, said.
It inaccurately claims that Vietnam did not cooperate in international efforts to search for the missing plane.
At a press conference in Hanoi on April 6 deputy spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pham Thu Hang, described assumptions made in the film as “untrue, baseless and inaccurate reflections of Vietnam’s efforts.”
It ignored Vietnamese authorities’ official conclusions, and caused “frustration among the Vietnamese populace,” she said.
The film about the fate of flight MH370 inaccurately asserted that Vietnam did not cooperate in international efforts to search for the missing plane.
She pointed out that Vietnamese authorities had promptly deployed response teams in cooperation with Malaysia and other countries, and shared information pertaining to its search operations.
Vietnam had gone to lengths to support foreign reporters covering news of the aircraft’s disappearance, she said.
“Vietnam’s efforts at the time were recognized by the international community, as well as both the domestic and foreign media.
“We ask the company that produced the film and the filmmakers [to remove or modify information] to accurately reflect Vietnam’s contributions to the search and rescue efforts for Malaysia’s flightMH370 aircraft.”
The Boeing 777-200ER aircraft was carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, when it lost contact with the ground less than an hour after taking off.
Following news of the missing plane, Vietnam deployed 10 ships and 11 planes on search missions.
Vietnamese forces scoured a sea area spanning over 100,000 km2 for over a week, but did not find any traces of the plane.
Vietnam then brought its efforts to a close and called on foreign search and rescue forces to do the same and leave Vietnam’s territorial waters.
The Malaysian government said on March 24, 2014, that analyzes of satellite signals showed MH370 had veered thousands of kilometers away from its designated route to the southern Indian Ocean.
Its tragic journey ended southwest of the Australian city of Perth.
After an unsuccessful search, the Malaysian government declared on January 1, 2015, that all of the plane’s 239 passengers and crew members had likely perished.
Authorities in Malaysia, China and Australia announced in January 2017 that they were suspending the search for MH370, ending a nearly three-year campaign in waters covering an area of about 120,000 square kilometers.
The cause of the aircraft’s disappearance remains unknown to this day, and its fuselage and black box have never been found.
