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The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner suffered a further setback on Thursday after Australian officials said wreckage from the aircraft was not on the sea floor in the area they had identified.
Flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared from radar screens on March 8 shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.
Investigators say what little evidence they have to work with, including the loss of communications, suggests the Boeing 777 was deliberately diverted thousands of miles from its scheduled route.
The search was narrowed last month after a series of acoustic pings thought to be from the plane's black box recorders were heard near where analysis of satellite data put its last location, some 1,000 miles off the northwest coast of Australia.
The U.S. Navy's Bluefin 21 finished its final underwater mission in the southern Indian Ocean on Wednesday after scouring 330 square miles, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre said.
"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and, in its professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370," the agency in charge of the search said in a statement released Thursday.
The underwater search for the airliner will be suspended for a couple of months while new, more powerful sonar equipment is brought in to search a much wider area of 21,600 square miles, based on analysis of satellite data of the plane's most likely course, the center said.
The discovery of the pings on April 5 and 8 was hailed as a significant breakthrough, with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott expressing confidence that searchers knew where the plane wreckage was within a few miles.
However, a thorough scan of the area around the pings with an unmanned submarine failed to find any sign of wreckage. No debris linked to the plane has been picked up despite the most extensive and expensive search effort in aviation history.
Earlier on Thursday, CNN quoted Michael Dean, the U.S. Navy's civilian deputy director of ocean engineering, and said authorities now almost universally believe the pings did not come from the plane's onboard data or cockpit voice recorders.
However, the U.S. Navy dismissed the reported comments.
"Mike Dean's comments today were speculative and premature, as we continue to work with our partners to more thoroughly understand the data acquired by the Towed Pinger Locator," U.S. Navy spokesman Chris Johnson said in a statement, referring to Australia and Malaysia.
Earlier this week, the Malaysian government released reams of raw satellite data it used to determine that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, a step long demanded by the families of some of the passengers onboard. The conclusion is based on complex calculations derived largely from brief hourly transmissions, or "handshakes," between the plane and a communications satellite operated by the British company Inmarsat.
But while the 45 pages of information may help satisfy a desire for more transparency in a criticized investigation, experts say it's unlikely to solve the mystery of Flight 370. Theories range from mechanical failure to hijacking or pilot murder-suicide.
Al Jazeera and wire services
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