Family members of 88 passengers who sued in U.S. courts over the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 will have to refile cases in Malaysia courts after a federal judge dismissed all 40 lawsuits.

In “one of the greatest aviation mysteries of modern times,” U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C., found that “the claims asserted in the consolidated complaints have a substantial and overriding nexus to Malaysia that outweighs the less substantial connection to the United States.”

Brown wrote that the dearth of U.S. citizens as passengers or plaintiffs, and the failure to identify the cause of the aircraft's disappearance, prompted her to dismiss the cases under the doctrine of forum non conveniens. Malaysia Airlines and Boeing had filed a joint motion to dismiss the cases based on the theory that a U.S. court was an inconvenient forum.