The search for Flight 370 turned into a criminal investigation on Saturday, after Malaysia declared that the plane had been deliberately diverted and then flown for as long as seven hours toward an unknown point far from its scheduled route of Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said Saturday afternoon that he would seek the help of governments across a large expanse of Asia in the search for the Boeing 777, which has been missing for a week and had 239 people on board. The Malaysian authorities released a map showing that the last satellite signal received from the plane had been sent from a point somewhere along one of two arcs spanning large distances across Asia. As part of the investigation, police officers were seen Saturday going to the home of the flight’s pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, in a gated compound, and the Malaysian news media reported that a search had taken place. A spokeswoman for the Royal Malaysia Police would neither confirm nor deny the reports but said there would be a news conference on Sunday. A satellite orbiting 22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the transmission that, based on the angle from which the plane sent it, came from somewhere along one of the two arcs. One arc runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia to northern Thailand, passing over some hot spots of global insurgency and highly militarized areas. The other arc runs from near Jakarta to the Indian Ocean, roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia. The plane changed course after it took off. “These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Mr. Najib said. He said one communications system had been disabled as the plane flew over the northeast coast of Malaysia. A second system, a transponder aboard the craft, abruptly stopped broadcasting its location, altitude, speed and other information at 1:21 a.m., while the plane was a third of the way across the Gulf of Thailand from Malaysia to Vietnam. Military radar data subsequently showed that the plane turned and flew west across northern Malaysia before arcing out over the wide northern end of the Strait of Malacca, headed at cruising altitude for the Indian Ocean. The flight had been scheduled to land at 6:30 a.m. in Beijing, so when its last signal was received, at 8:11 a.m., Mr. Najib said, it could have been nearly out of fuel. “The investigation team is making further calculations, which will indicate how far the aircraft may have flown after the last point of contact,” Mr. Najib said, reading a statement in English. “Due to the type of satellite data, we are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with a satellite.” The northern arc Mr. Najib described passes near some of the world’s most volatile countries that are home to insurgent groups, but also over areas with a strong military presence and robust air defense networks, some run by the American military. The arc passes close to northern Iran, through Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and through northern India and the Himalayas and Myanmar. An aircraft flying on that arc would have to pass through air defense networks in India and Pakistan, whose mutual border is heavily militarized, as well as through Afghanistan, where the United States and other NATO countries have operated air bases for more than a decade. Air bases near that arc include Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where the United States Air Force’s 455th Air Expeditionary Wing is based, and an Indian air base, Hindon Air Force Station. The southern arc, from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean, travels over open water with few islands. If the aircraft took that path, it might have passed near the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. These remote Australian islands, with a population of fewer than 1,000 people, have a small airport. After Mr. Najib’s statement on Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded to know more, and said China was sending technical experts to Malaysia. Two-thirds of the people on the jet were Chinese citizens. A ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said China would shift its search planes and ships to areas west of Malaysia. That region includes countries that have tensions with China, including India. Mr. Qin said China would seek the cooperation of any countries affected by the redeployment. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, convened ministries and agencies on Saturday to discuss the developments. Even with a vastly larger area to search, the officials insisted that the effort must continue with increased vigor. “The search remains the most pressing and No. 1. task for now,” said an the account of the meeting on the ministry website. The officials said the broader search would cover land as well as sea. In Washington, the Malaysian announcement did little to change American investigators’ perspectives on what happened to the plane. “It doesn’t mean anything; all it is is a theory,” one senior American official said. “Find the plane, find the black boxes and then we can figure out what happened. It has to be based on something, and until they have something more to go on it’s all just theories.” The investigator spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the inquiry. American investigators have been provided with much of the flight data obtained from radar and satellites, but they say they have far less information about what the Malaysian government has uncovered about the pilots and passengers or the Malaysian inquiry. Soon after the plane disappeared, F.B.I. agents and other American investigators “scrubbed” the names of the pilots and passengers — including two Iranian men who traveled on stolen passports — to determine whether they had any connection to terrorists and found none, according to the officials. Officials in Washington say they are frustrated because they believe that the F.B.I. could be of substantial assistance. The Malaysian government has said that analyzing this data is a slow and painstaking process. Source: New York Times
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 03:42:59 +0000
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