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Military personnel looking out of a Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) transport plane as they search for the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane over the South China Sea yesterday.
Agencies
Kuala Lumpur
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The mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane deepened yesterday as a military official suggested the aircraft had not only been turned around but flown back across the Malay peninsula.
Flight MH370 was bound for Beijing when it vanished in the early hours of Saturday morning with 239 people on board. Until yesterday, the last known contact with the flight was thought to be at about 1.20am - 40 minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur - after the plane crossed Malaysia’s east coast and was flying over the South China Sea towards Vietnam.
But the Malaysian air force chief, Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, said the plane was detected at 2.40am near Pulau Perak, an island in the Malacca Strait, several hundred kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur.
“After that, the signal from the plane was lost,” he told the Berita Harian, a Malay-language newspaper.
An unnamed military official told Reuters news agency: “(The plane) changed course after Kota Bharu (on the east coast) and took a lower altitude. It made it in to the Malacca Strait.”
Pilots are supposed to inform their airlines and air traffic control if they change course. MH370 never did so; nor did crew issue a distress call.
It is unclear why the contact from the west coast, if correct, was not made public until now.
Authorities did not discuss why the aircraft might have turned around. One possibility is that it ran into unspecified difficulties and the crew judged it better to return to an airport they knew well.
Malaysia had opened a terror probe, joined by FBI agents from the United States. But the revelation of the identities of two men who boarded the flight using stolen European passports suggested they were young Iranian migrants seeking a new life overseas.
Interpol named the pair as Pouria Nourmohammadi, 18, who was booked to fly on to Germany, and Seyed Mohamed Reza Delavar, 29, who was ticketed through to Denmark.
Delavar’s ultimate destination was Sweden, where he intended to apply for political asylum, according to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.
The two travelled to Kuala Lumpur from Doha on their real Iranian passports, and their identification was helped by relatives in Europe who reported them missing, officials said.
The head of the US Central Intelligence Agency yesterday said that terrorism could not be ruled out in the disappearance of the airliner, describing the plane’s fate as a “mystery
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