Excruciating Wait for Families After Plane Vanishes

Family members and friends of some of the 227 passengers aboard a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared en route to Beijing gathered Saturday at the airport where it was supposed to have arrived hours earlier, desperate for any clues on the plane's fate. "I asked them what was going but they just tell us, 'We don't know,'" one person told Reuters. The airline said 153 of the people aboard the plane were Chinese, and authorities in the Chinese capital were directing frantic relatives to a hotel to await official word. Passengers in the airport, meanwhile, were spotted snapping photographs of the airport arrivals board and the flight's listing there in red: "Delayed."

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