#MalaysiaAirlines, #MH370, #PrayForMH370
Deliberate act in Flight 370
Malaysia PM: Malaysia Airlines probe refocusing on passengers, crew
A week after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, investigators
refocused on passengers and crew on board after data indicated the plane
deviated due to deliberate action, Prime Minister Najib Razak said
Saturday.
"Malaysian authorities
have refocused their investigation on crew and passengers aboard," Najib
told reporters. "Evidence is consistent with someone acting
deliberately from inside the plane." But Najib stopped short of calling it a hijacking, saying investigators have not made a final determination.
"Despite media reports
that the plane was hijacked, we are investigating all major
possibilities on what caused MH370 to deviate," he said.
In addition to the shift
in focus, investigators have expanded search areas exponentially, and no
are no longer combing the South China Sea, the Prime Minister said.
"The plane's last
communication with the satellite was in one of two possible corridors: a
northern corridor stretching approximately from the border of
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, or a southern corridor
stretching approximately from Indonesia to the southern Indian ocean.
The investigation team is working to further refine the information."
The passenger jetliner
disappeared March 8, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239
people aboard. It's unclear who took the plane or what the motive was.
"Based on new satellite
information, we can say with a high degree of certainty that the
aircraft communications addressing and reporting system was disabled
just before the aircraft reached the East Coast of peninsular Malaysia,"
the Prime Minister said. "Shortly afterward, near the border between
Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control, the aircraft's transponder
was switched off."
Theories on what happened
have evolved every day, complete with satellite images with purported
wreckage released by a Chinese agency, and later debunked by Beijing.
Hours before the Prime
Minister's announcement, U.S. officials told CNN the flight made drastic
changes in altitude and direction after disappearing from civilian
radar, raising questions about who was at the controls of the jetliner
when it vanished.
The more the United
States learns about the flight's pattern, "the more difficult to write
off" the idea that some type of human intervention was involved, one of
the officials familiar with the investigation said.
CNN has learned that a
classified analysis of electronic and satellite data suggests the flight
likely crashed either in the Bay of Bengal or elsewhere in the Indian
Ocean. The Prime Minister said the areas have been searched.
"We have conducted
search operations over land, in the South China Sea, the Straits of
Malacca, the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean," he said. "At every
stage, we acted on the basis of verified information, and we followed
every credible lead. Sometimes these leads have led nowhere."
The analysis used radar
data and satellite pings to calculate that the plane diverted to the
west, across the Malayan peninsula, and then either flew in a northwest
direction toward the Bay of Bengal or southwest into the Indian Ocean.
The theory builds on
earlier revelations by U.S. officials that an automated reporting system
on the airliner was pinging satellites for up to five hours after its
last reported contact with air traffic controllers. Inmarsat, a
satellite communications company, confirmed to CNN that automated
signals were registered on its network.
Taken together, the data
point toward speculation of a dark scenario in which someone took
control of the plane for some unknown purpose, perhaps terrorism.
That theory is buoyed by
word from a senior U.S. official familiar with the investigation that
the Malaysia Airlines plane made several significant altitude changes
and altered its course more than once after losing contact with flight
towers.
The jetliner was flying "a strange path," the official said on condition of anonymity. The details of the radar readings were first reported by The New York Times on Friday.
Malaysian military radar
showed the plane climbing to 45,000 feet soon after disappearing from
civilian radar screens and then dropping to 23,000 feet before climbing
again, the official said.
The question of what
happened to the jetliner has turned into one of the biggest mysteries in
aviation history, befuddling industry experts and government officials.
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