A Chinese court has ordered Malaysia Airlines to pay 2.9m yuan (around £300,000) to each of the families of eight MH370 flight passengers.
The victims went missing when the flight vanished more than a decade ago. While it is still unknown what happened to the passengers, they have been declared legally dead.
A Beijing court ordered the company to pay the damages for emotional distress and to cover funeral expenses.
The court said that another 23 cases remain pending, while in 47 other cases, families have reached agreements and withdrawn their suits.
The compensation order comes as the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is to resume this month.
On 8 March 2014, 227 passengers and a dozen crew members took off in a Boeing 777 at Kuala Lumpur airport for an overnight flight to Beijing.
The morning after, however, it was reported that the aircraft had vanished. Almost 12 years on, it is still unknown what happened to the aircraft or what caused it to go missing.
After MH370 disappeared from radar screens, it was initially presumed that the aircraft had come down in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.
However, a week after the disappearance, transmissions of technical data (described as “pings”) showed that the plane had kept flying for at least seven hours after it vanished from radar screens.
The plane had suddenly changed course at the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.
The new search, due to begin on 30 December, is the fourth attempt to try and find the missing Boeing plane and will last for 55 days.
This is the third attempt to find MH370 by Ocean Infinity, a marine robotics company based in Austin, Texas, and Southampton.
The search area, located in the southern Indian Ocean, covers an estimated 5,790 square miles – an area larger than Northern Ireland or the state of Maryland.
Read more: MH370 search resumes – what we know – and what we don’t – about the vanished Malaysia Airlines jet
