Coastguards from India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands joined the airborne search on Wednesday for a missing Malaysian airliner, a senior official told Reuters.

A Dornier aircraft belonging to the coastguard set off at 2.30 p.m. local time to search the eastern side of the Andaman islands, on orders from New Delhi, said VSR Murthy, the inspector general of the coastguard service on the islands.

The airliner, which had 239 people on board, vanished from air traffic control screens midway between Malaysia's east coast and Vietnam.

Malaysia's military radar has detected what could have been the jetliner in the northern Malacca Strait, a stretch of water that flows into the Andaman Sea, Malaysia's air force chief said earlier on Wednesday. He stressed that the information needed to be corroborated. – Reuters