PHNOM PENH, March 16 (Xinhua) -- About 1,000 Cambodian Muslims on Sunday evening prayed for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board, which vanished on March 8.

The prayer, held in a mosque on the outskirts of the capital Phnom Penh, led by Osman Hassan and Zakaria Adam, both are the ministers attached to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

"We, Muslims in Cambodia, are very concerned over the safety of the passengers and crew aboard the missing jetliner, so we pray to our Allah for them," Osman Hassan said.

"We hope that the search and rescue teams will find the vanished plane soon."

Meanwhile, he also expressed deep sympathy to the family members of the passengers and crew on board the missing plane.

The plane went missing on its way from Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur to China's Beijing on March 8, the airlines said, adding that it lost communication and radar signal two hours into the flight over south Vietnam at 1:20 a.m.

According to the carrier, 154 Chinese nationals were among the passengers onboard the plane.

Malaysia's Defense and Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a press conference Sunday in Kuala Lumpur that the number of countries involved in the search and rescue operation has increased from 14 to 25 and he appealed to those countries to provide satellite information, radar playback as well as aircraft and ships to continue the ever-expanding search.