02-19-2020, 11:36 PM
MH370: 'He said; she said!' cont/- 
Via the Oz:
Malaysia suspected murder flight plot
AMANDA HODGE
SOUTHEAST ASIA CORRESPONDENT
@hodgeamanda
![[Image: 305dc4d95060c95d6a2de6b21daf4f16?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/305dc4d95060c95d6a2de6b21daf4f16?width=650)
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak. Picture: AFP
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak has said his government “never ruled out” the possibility that Malaysian Airlines MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was behind the plane’s disappearance, but did not go public with its suspicions because it could not prove them.
His comments support revelations by Tony Abbott this week that the most senior figures in the Malaysian government when MH370 disappeared suspected murder-suicide by pilot.
“This possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations,” Mr Najib told the Free Malaysia Today news site on Wednesday.
He said the suspicions were never made public because it would have been “irresponsible since the black box and cockpit recorder had not been found”.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 had 239 people aboard when it fell off the radar screen 40 minutes into its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
In a two-part Sky News documentary this week on the MH370 disappearance, Mr Abbott revealed that as then Australian prime minister he was told by “the very top levels of the Malaysian government … that from very, very early on they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot”.
![[Image: b9245f639f540e5417bae9fca61e0c01?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/b9245f639f540e5417bae9fca61e0c01?width=650)
Tony Abbott appears on the Sky News documentary on the MH370 disappearance. Picture: Sky News
Those comments prompted one of the current Malaysian government’s most senior figures, Lim Kit Siang, to call for an international inquiry into the plane’s disappearance.
Mr Lim, founder and head of the Democratic Action Party — one of four parties in Malaysia’s ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition — also called on former Najib government members to reveal what they know about MH370.
“The highest levels of the former Malaysian government who believed from very early on that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot must now speak up,” he said.
“It would appear an international commission of inquiry into the MH370 disappearance would be necessary as a result of Abbott’s revelations.”
Mr Najib, who is facing trial on 42 charges of corruption and abuse of office related to the multi-billion-dollar 1MDB misappropriation scandal, said suspicion fell on Zaharie because the plane’s transponders were switched off just as it was about to enter Vietnam air space.
“This suggests that whoever was responsible had knowledge of commercial flights,” he said.
He also referred to Zaharie’s links to the then political opposition and the fact he was distantly related by marriage to prime minister-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim.
The plane went missing a day after Anwar was sentenced to what was widely seen as a second politically motivated jail term for sodomy, and Zaharie was widely reported to have attended the hearing.
An investigation by the Malaysian government concluded there was no evidence Zaharie had hijacked his own aircraft.
The report described Zaharie as a model pilot and well-adjusted individual who had no financial or personal problems, though it was later revealed he had marital problems and had developed a close relationship with a younger woman.
Malaysian police Inspector-General Abdul Hamid Bador, a former MH370 investigator, said there was no evidence to support the theory that the pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 committed murder-suicide, and such claims could not be verified unless the plane was found.
“I do not know who is the Malaysian official Abbott was referring to, but I was among those involved in the investigation,” he said on Wednesday.
“We investigated all angles, from terrorism to hijack by certain parties.
“There were various theories that involved the use of sophisticated technology and a lot of facts were gathered.”
Plus Beaker is back...
We got it wrong, says ex-MH370 search head Martin Dolan
EAN HIGGINS
REPORTER
@EanHiggins
8:00PM FEBRUARY 19, 2020
The senior public servant in charge of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has admitted the $200m hunt may have failed because he refused to accept the captain hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end.
Martin Dolan, former chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, has conceded in a documentary that new evidence increasingly points to the ATSB’s theory that MH370 was unpiloted at the end being wrong.
Then transport minister Warren Truss also admits in the Sky News special MH370: The Untold Story, airing on Wednesday and Thursday nights, that the ATSB was “looking in the wrong place” in trying to find the Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board.
Mr Dolan says independent aviation experts such as veteran pilot Byron Bailey, whom the government dismissed when he promoted the rogue-pilot-to-the-end conclusion early in the search, may be right after all. He says a rogue pilot may have depressurised the aircraft to kill the passengers and crew through oxygen deprivation, while he alone in the cockpit had a much longer oxygen supply.
New evidence and analysis, such as the pattern of damage on wing parts of the aircraft found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean that independent experts say show the aircraft was deliberately ditched, appear to have changed Mr Dolan’s mind.
“We just now have some additional information which has been brought to bear … that means there’s an increasing likelihood that there was someone at the controls at the end of flight,” Mr Dolan says.
The admissions mark an about-face for Mr Dolan, who during the two-year search for MH370 after its disappearance in 2014 repeatedly said suggestions Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew it to a controlled ditching were “very unlikely”.
In the documentary, Mr Dolan says of Mr Bailey’s scenario: “He might be right — I don’t disagree with any of the basic assumptions that Byron has.”
As revealed by The Australian on Tuesday, then prime minister Tony Abbott says in the documentary he had known within days that the pilot had hijacked his own aircraft in an act of mass murder-suicide because senior Malaysian officials had told him the evidence pointed that way.
MH370 disappeared 40 minutes into a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. A play-back of military radar and automatic satellite handshake data revealed it flew a zig-zag course back over Malaysia and up the Straits of Malacca before turning on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean, its secondary radar transponder turned off and radio contact broken.
The ATSB based its two-year search on the assumption that by the end, MH370 was a ghost flight with “unresponsive” pilots, crashing after running out of fuel while flying on autopilot.
ATSB spokesman Paul Sadler did not respond to questions asking whether the bureau had changed its mind on its “ghost flight/death dive” theory.
![[Image: 918671898f0c499bd6d349410bd3460c?width=650]](https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/918671898f0c499bd6d349410bd3460c?width=650)
MTF...P2
Via the Oz:
Malaysia suspected murder flight plot
AMANDA HODGE
SOUTHEAST ASIA CORRESPONDENT
@hodgeamanda
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak. Picture: AFP
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak has said his government “never ruled out” the possibility that Malaysian Airlines MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was behind the plane’s disappearance, but did not go public with its suspicions because it could not prove them.
His comments support revelations by Tony Abbott this week that the most senior figures in the Malaysian government when MH370 disappeared suspected murder-suicide by pilot.
“This possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations,” Mr Najib told the Free Malaysia Today news site on Wednesday.
He said the suspicions were never made public because it would have been “irresponsible since the black box and cockpit recorder had not been found”.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 had 239 people aboard when it fell off the radar screen 40 minutes into its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
In a two-part Sky News documentary this week on the MH370 disappearance, Mr Abbott revealed that as then Australian prime minister he was told by “the very top levels of the Malaysian government … that from very, very early on they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot”.
Tony Abbott appears on the Sky News documentary on the MH370 disappearance. Picture: Sky News
Those comments prompted one of the current Malaysian government’s most senior figures, Lim Kit Siang, to call for an international inquiry into the plane’s disappearance.
Mr Lim, founder and head of the Democratic Action Party — one of four parties in Malaysia’s ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition — also called on former Najib government members to reveal what they know about MH370.
“The highest levels of the former Malaysian government who believed from very early on that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot must now speak up,” he said.
“It would appear an international commission of inquiry into the MH370 disappearance would be necessary as a result of Abbott’s revelations.”
Mr Najib, who is facing trial on 42 charges of corruption and abuse of office related to the multi-billion-dollar 1MDB misappropriation scandal, said suspicion fell on Zaharie because the plane’s transponders were switched off just as it was about to enter Vietnam air space.
“This suggests that whoever was responsible had knowledge of commercial flights,” he said.
He also referred to Zaharie’s links to the then political opposition and the fact he was distantly related by marriage to prime minister-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim.
The plane went missing a day after Anwar was sentenced to what was widely seen as a second politically motivated jail term for sodomy, and Zaharie was widely reported to have attended the hearing.
An investigation by the Malaysian government concluded there was no evidence Zaharie had hijacked his own aircraft.
The report described Zaharie as a model pilot and well-adjusted individual who had no financial or personal problems, though it was later revealed he had marital problems and had developed a close relationship with a younger woman.
Malaysian police Inspector-General Abdul Hamid Bador, a former MH370 investigator, said there was no evidence to support the theory that the pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 committed murder-suicide, and such claims could not be verified unless the plane was found.
“I do not know who is the Malaysian official Abbott was referring to, but I was among those involved in the investigation,” he said on Wednesday.
“We investigated all angles, from terrorism to hijack by certain parties.
“There were various theories that involved the use of sophisticated technology and a lot of facts were gathered.”
Plus Beaker is back...
We got it wrong, says ex-MH370 search head Martin Dolan
EAN HIGGINS
REPORTER
@EanHiggins
8:00PM FEBRUARY 19, 2020
The senior public servant in charge of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has admitted the $200m hunt may have failed because he refused to accept the captain hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end.
Martin Dolan, former chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, has conceded in a documentary that new evidence increasingly points to the ATSB’s theory that MH370 was unpiloted at the end being wrong.
Then transport minister Warren Truss also admits in the Sky News special MH370: The Untold Story, airing on Wednesday and Thursday nights, that the ATSB was “looking in the wrong place” in trying to find the Boeing 777 and the 239 people on board.
Mr Dolan says independent aviation experts such as veteran pilot Byron Bailey, whom the government dismissed when he promoted the rogue-pilot-to-the-end conclusion early in the search, may be right after all. He says a rogue pilot may have depressurised the aircraft to kill the passengers and crew through oxygen deprivation, while he alone in the cockpit had a much longer oxygen supply.
New evidence and analysis, such as the pattern of damage on wing parts of the aircraft found washed up on the other side of the Indian Ocean that independent experts say show the aircraft was deliberately ditched, appear to have changed Mr Dolan’s mind.
“We just now have some additional information which has been brought to bear … that means there’s an increasing likelihood that there was someone at the controls at the end of flight,” Mr Dolan says.
The admissions mark an about-face for Mr Dolan, who during the two-year search for MH370 after its disappearance in 2014 repeatedly said suggestions Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew it to a controlled ditching were “very unlikely”.
In the documentary, Mr Dolan says of Mr Bailey’s scenario: “He might be right — I don’t disagree with any of the basic assumptions that Byron has.”
As revealed by The Australian on Tuesday, then prime minister Tony Abbott says in the documentary he had known within days that the pilot had hijacked his own aircraft in an act of mass murder-suicide because senior Malaysian officials had told him the evidence pointed that way.
MH370 disappeared 40 minutes into a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. A play-back of military radar and automatic satellite handshake data revealed it flew a zig-zag course back over Malaysia and up the Straits of Malacca before turning on a long track to the southern Indian Ocean, its secondary radar transponder turned off and radio contact broken.
The ATSB based its two-year search on the assumption that by the end, MH370 was a ghost flight with “unresponsive” pilots, crashing after running out of fuel while flying on autopilot.
ATSB spokesman Paul Sadler did not respond to questions asking whether the bureau had changed its mind on its “ghost flight/death dive” theory.
MTF...P2