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Malaysia officials say missing jet may have turned back
Mar 09, 201412:07 PM
Malaysia’s air force chief says that military radar indicated the missing Boeing 777 jet may have turned back, but declined to give further details on how far the plane may have veered off course.
Rodzali Daud told a press conference Sunday that “there is a possible indication that the aircraft made a turnback,” adding that authorities were “trying to make sense of that.
Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said the pilot is supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if he does return, but that officials had received no such distress call.
The plane vanished from screens early Saturday morning en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.
Malaysian investigators are checking the identity of four passengers on a missing Malaysia Airlines flight, but will also focus on the entire passenger manifest, the country’s transport minister said on Sunday.
A Malaysia Airlines representative speaking to families of passengers on the vanished Flight 370 said the airline was pessimistic.
Hishamuddin Hussein also confirmed that Malaysian authorities had met with counterparts from the FBI, adding that investigators are also looking into whether the airliner was turned back.
Earlier, officials said two names on the passenger manifest of the plane matched passports reported stolen in Thailand, one from an Italian man and the other from an Austrian man.
Search operations continued Sunday for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, but officials said no sightings of the wreckage had been reported after an all-night search. Authorities confirmed an oil slick had been spotted by Vietnamese planes in the water off Vietnam.
A representative of the Malaysia Civil Aviation Authority said the aerial search resumed in the morning for Flight MH370. Marine rescue teams from several countries had been working through the night.
“So far there’s no report of any sightings,” aviation official Azaharuddin Abdul Rahman said at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Search and rescue teams were still unable to detect the whereabouts of the missing aircraft, he said.
The search area had also been expanded, the official said, adding that authorities were also investigating terrorism concerns.
U.S. officials told NBC News on Saturday they were also investigating that possible concern.
The officials said that they had found no clear link to terrorism. There are other criminal reasons, for example drug smuggling, that stolen passports might be used to board a plane.
The news, hours after the jet disappeared over the South China Sea with 239 people on board, significantly changed how U.S. officials looked at the disaster. The officials said they were checking into passenger manifests and going back through intelligence.
“We are aware of the reporting on the two stolen passports,” one senior official said. “We have not determined a nexus to terrorism yet, although it’s still very early, and that’s by no means definitive.”
There was still no sign of wreckage more than 24 hours after air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane, a red-eye from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. It vanished in relatively clear weather, without sending a distress signal, at what analysts said would have been cruising altitude. In a possible clue, Vietnamese planes spotted two oil slicks consistent with jet fuel in the water off Vietnam.
On board were 227 passengers and 12 crew. Most of the passengers were Chinese. Three were Americans — one adult and two children, according to the passenger manifest. - Agencies
