DHAKA: Malaysia warned Thursday that the cost of the search for flight MH370’s wreckage in the vast depths of the Indian Ocean will be ‘huge’, the latest sobering assessment by authorities involved in the challenging effort.

‘When we look at salvaging (wreckage) at a depth of 4.5 kilometres, no military out there has the capacity to do it,’ Malaysia transport and defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, according to Hindustan Times.

‘We have to look at contractors, and the cost of that will be huge.’

The search in a remote stretch of ocean far off western Australia was enlivened in the past two weeks by the detection of signals believed to be from the Malaysia Airlines plane’s flight data recorders on the seabed.

But the transmissions have gone silent before they could be pinpointed, raising the spectre of a costly and extensive search of a large swathe of ocean floor at extreme depths.

Australia prime minister Tony Abbott, which is leading the multi-national search, had earlier warned in an interview published Thursday that an autonomous US Navy sonar device that began scanning the seabed for wreckage on Monday would be given one more week.

If nothing is found, authorities would reassess how next to proceed in the unprecedented mission to find the plane, Abbott said in the Wall Street Journal.

BDST: 1919 HRS, APR 17, 2014