Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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PERTH: The absence of Danica Weeks at a candlelight vigil for MH370 victims at a Perth beach on Sunday was conspicuous.

The 38-year-old mother of two is the wife of Paul Weeks, a New Zealander who was one of the 239 people on board the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 that disappeared over the South China Sea more than a year ago.

Danica said she did not attend the candlelight vigil because it would have been too confronting.

“Since my husband vanished with MH370 on March 8 last year, I have been experiencing many highs and lows, and right now I am going through the lows,” she said. “I am not strong enough to handle such an event as it will be too confronting for me and I am not sure I could hold it together.”

Danica also wrote to the vigil organisers, the Association of Malaysians in Western Australia, saying: “It is amazing to see people stand beside us remembering our loved ones.”

In an exclusive interview with The Malaysian Insider, Danica spoke of her pain and frustration as she battled to bring up her two children, Lincoln, 4, and Jack, almost 1 year old, in the face of “constant stonewalling by the Malaysian authorities, including their lack of transparency and failure to communicate properly with us, the suffering families”.

“I am not coping. I am just existing looking after my two children as Paul would have wanted. I go through routines. I try not to be alone but it’s getting harder, I go through sadness, desperation … depression. I am tired and exhausted.

“And I have not even started grieving yet. There is nothing there, no evidence, no memorial. We haven’t even got a piece of the plane. What do I tell my two children?

“It is so surreal, like you are living a movie, that this (disappearance of the plane) could happen in this day and age is unreal. We are here, more than a year has passed, and we know nothing more than we knew at the start.”

Danica said as the mystery over MH370 deepened and the search in the Indian Ocean 1,600km south of Perth failed to deliver any answers, she was beginning to lean towards conspiracy and cover-up theories.

“They are saying it is the greatest aviation mystery. I think it is the greatest aviation cover-up. What the cover-up is I don’t know. It may be something simple … I don’t know.”

Danica fondly recalls the visit of Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor, the wife of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, to her Perth home a month after the disappearance of MH370. A year on, she doesn’t think Rosmah was putting on a show for the cameras.

“She is a lovely lady. She is a wife, a mother. She understands the impact of all this on us and all the other families.

“As time goes on, I see it is her husband (Najib) and everyone else in government who are making the decisions. Actions speak louder than words. And how they have done this is diabolical and disgusting. I couldn’t even imagine that human beings could treat other human beings like that, regardless of culture.” — The Malaysian Insider

 

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on March 25, 2015.

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