Which Country Would Get Jurisdiction of Black Boxes
BERMAN: 35 days into the search of flight 370. They could find the black boxes that might reveal what caused this flight to end. But which country gets jurisdiction over the flight data recorder. I want to bring in our Nic Robertson, at Malaysia's capitol of Kuala Lumpur, who was in a heck of a downpour just right there. He is on the phone. Nic, a lot of people would be ecstatic over the idea of finding these devices. It wouldn't occur to them that there would be a fight or conflict over the jurisdiction. What's the situation?</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): John, They, Malaysia has jurisdiction. They say a normal investigation, although they are not leading the search, they are leading the investigation. They say the problem is that they don't actually have experts capable of extracting the data from the black boxes. So although they are going to need to turn to other experts, they didn't say which experts they would turn to. The Australians, the British the French are all involved. And some of the families would like French investigators involved in this. It is up to the Malaysians to decide. The black box will be under their jurisdiction and they will decide and they will get the data inside it.</s>BERMAN: One would hope they would seek the help of other nations with experience. At this point, there are other countries involved in the search.</s>ROBERTSON: I think, at the moment, we can reasonably expect the Malaysians to turn to the country that is capable of doing this. What would happen after that is that they would likely take control of it themselves. And they certainly are doing investigations of downed aircraft at Malaysian where several dozen were killed on that aircraft and that was investigated by the Malaysian authorities using the black box data recorder. They have to use the data, but police say whatever they are finding out on the ground here, it is important.</s>BERMAN: Right, certainly there have been enough hiccups in this investigation so far. Nic Robertson, thank you so much for that reporting. Ahead for us @ THIS HOUR, the search area is much smaller now. We'll have much more on that. If it is so small, why are they still searching in two places? We'll answer that question after the break.