DHAKA: The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will likely continue for ‘a long time’, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott warned on Saturday, a day after voicing confidence that signals from the black box had been detected.

The Australian-led search for the Boeing 777, which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, is racing to gather as many signals as possible to determine an exact resting place before a submersible is sent down to find wreckage.

‘We do have a high degree of confidence the transmissions we have been picking up are from flight MH370,’ Abbott said on the last day of his visit to China.

But ‘no one should under-estimate the difficulties of the task ahead of us’, he added in a press conference broadcast live on Sky television.

BDST: 1020 HRS, APR 12, 2014