(CNN) -- A week after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, the investigation shifted to its passengers and crew after data showed 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. 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. Kazakhstan to Indian Ocean In addition to the shift in focus, investigators have expanded search areas exponentially, and are no longer combing the South China Sea, the Prime Minister said. Crews followed leads and also searched the Straits of Malacca, the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean, but now data point in a different direction. The planes 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, he said. The investigation team is working to further refine the information. The passenger jetliner disappeared on March 8, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people aboard. Its 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 ... 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 aircrafts transponder was switched off.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 09:13:00 +0000
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