hijack MH370 as political protest against Anwar’s latest jail term?

Did pilot hijack MH370 as political protest against Anwar’s latest jail term?

 

Did pilot hijack MH370 as political protest against Anwar’s latest jail term?

With the authorities settling on what amounts to air piracy, the Daily Mail is reporting a theory that the pilot of MH370 may have hijacked the plane as a political protest against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's latest sodomy conviction.

The British tabloid revealed that hours before he took command of the Boeing 777-200ER (9M-MRO) bound for Beijing last Saturday, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had gone to court on March 7 for the trial and sentencing of Anwar in the sodomy case.

The opposition leader was jailed for five years by the Court of Appeal which had overturned his High Court acquittal for sodomising a former aide in 2008.

The newspaper said police sources confirmed that the 53-year-old captain was a vocal political activist, and were probing into the probability that he would have been profoundly upset by the court ruling.

Yesterday, police searched the veteran pilot's home in Shah Alam, where he keeps a home-made flight simulator.

The Daily Mail added, however, that investigators had already spent much of last week examining two laptops removed from Zaharie’s home, where one of it is believed to contain data from the simulator.

The report also said despite a series of denials by officials that Zaharie's home was searched, two laptops were taken from his home during low-key visits by police early last week.

His personal laptop was not found, however, and thought to be with him in the cockpit, the Daily Mail reported.

According to Zaharie's co-workers, he was a social activist with fervent support for Anwar and with strong political beliefs, with one colleague saying that the veteran pilot was obsessed with politics.

Zaharie was flying the MH370 alongside co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, from whom investigators have been keen to deflect suspicion, the Daily Mail reported.

Investigators told the British newspaper that they were looking into the theory that Zaharie's political views may have been a factor to consider in the controversy surrounding the missing plane with 239 people onboard.

“There are huge sensitivities surrounding this but we cannot afford not to pursue any angle brought to our attention," Daily Mail reported, quoting investigators.

Zaharie is believed to be separated or divorced from his wife although they share the same house, the report said.

The report further stated that the raid on Zaharie's home appeared to be “stage-managed” as a display of intent after  Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said at a specially called press conference yesterday that the focus of the investigation was now on “crew and passengers” as a result of the latest leads.

Stopping short of calling it a hijacking, Najib said yesterday that flight MH370's unusual deviation westwards was “consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane”.

Western media outlets have quoted American intelligence officials as saying that the jet was flown by an expert after it vanished from radar screens early March 8, 2014, while en route to Beijing.

This has led investigators to vet through all 239 passengers and crew members of the carrier in the hopes of finding facts to counter such attacks.

The Daily Mail report also said that the fact that jet climbed to 13,700m, which is above the service limit, could have been a deliberate attempt to knock out the passengers and crew. – March 16, 2014.

A new search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 

A new search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean as authorities try to determine what happened to a missing Malaysian airliner, the White House said on Thursday.

"It's my understanding that based on some new information that's not necessarily conclusive - but new information - an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. "And we are consulting with international partners about the appropriate assets to deploy."

Carney did not specify the nature of the "new information."

Carney sidestepped a question as to whether the United States has confidence in the investigation being conducted by the Malaysian government.

"I just don't have an evaluation to make," he said. "What I can tell you is that we're working with the Malaysian government to try to find the plane; find out what happened to it for the sake of the families and, obviously, for the sake of knowing what caused the plane to disappear."

The United States has been helping in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, including the deployment of U.S. Navy vessels. It also has sent National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration officials there.

"There are a number of possible scenarios that are being investigated as to what happened to the flight. And we are not in a position at this time to make conclusions about what happened, unfortunately. But we're actively participating in the search," Carney told a regular news briefing.

"We're looking at information, pursuing possible leads, working within the investigation being led by the Malaysian government."

U.S. defense officials told Reuters the guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd was en route to Strait of Malacca, west of the Malaysian peninsula, to continue the search for the missing jetliner, answering a request from the Malaysian government. The officials said they were unaware of any new evidence indicating where the plane might have crashed.

The Kidd had been searching the areas south of the Gulf of Thailand, along with the destroyer USS Pinckney. A U.S. defense official noted that a Navy P-3 Orion aircraft had already searched the Strait of Malacca.

(Reporting by Will Dunham, Phil Stewart and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Sandra Maler)

MH370 - Jet Li's stunt double

Jet Li's stunt double on MH370

According to Deadline, the fate of the 35-year-old stuntman, who also worked as Jet Li's stunt double and been in films like "Fearless", "The Expendables" and "The Forbidden Kingdom" is still unknown, but his family and friends are hoping for the best.

As the world mourns the sudden disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Netflix and The Weinstein Company have a new update: Ju Kun, a veteran martial arts expert and assistant martial arts choreographer, is among the 227 passengers on board.

"We are deeply saddened by the news about Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Ju Kun, who was on board, was an integral part of our production team and a tremendous talent. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this difficult time," said Netflix and The Weinstein Company.

Ju Kun was in Malaysia to work on "Marco Polo", Netflix and The Weinstein Company's series pilot created by John Fusco that is scheduled to begin production in three weeks. The martial arts choreographer had just completed his work in Pinewood Studios in Malaysia and was flying to his home in Beijing when he boarded the flight.

"All of us on location in Malaysia are devastated as we go through this agonizing wait," said Fusco.

"Ju Kun is an integral and beloved member of our Marco Polo family, and on behalf of Harvey Weinstein and Netflix, we are all profoundly shocked and saddened. Right now we are rallying around his wife, Li Ping as she awaits answers in Kuala Lumpur. Our hearts and prayers are also with all of the other missing passengers and their families."

The Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 made the headlines when it went missing over the weekend (8 March), 35,000 feet over Vietnam. No contact has been successfully established as yet, prompting fears of a crash. Search efforts by various countries are currently underway, but no wreckage had been found.

may have detected missing plane mh370

Malaysian Air Force chief on Wednesday said a “blip” detected on the military radar may have been the missing flight MH370 in an area northwest of Penang in the Straits of Malacca, amid uncertainty over where to look for the plane that disappeared with 239 people on board.
Air Force Chief Rodzali Daud said the ‘plot’ was detected at 2:15 a.m. on Saturday at 200 miles northwest of the island of Penang at the northern end of the Straits of Malacca.
However, it is not known if it was the missing plane as that sort of data is not recorded by the military radar.
This would be 45 minutes after the Boeing 777-200 lost contact with air traffic control about 100 miles from Kota Baru at 1.31 a.m. on Saturday. The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing had taken off at 12.41 a.m. on Saturday.
The multi-national search operations were then extended to the Straits of Malacca from the original search site in the South China Sea. The search is still on in both areas, with 42 ships and 39 aircraft from 12 countries taking part.
Rodzali said it was not confirmed that the unidentified plane was the missing flight, but Malaysia was sharing the data with international civilian and military authorities.
According to the data provided by Rodzali, a position 200 miles northwest of Penang, in the northern part of the Strait of Malacca, would put the missing plane roughly south of Thailand’s tourist destination Phuket and east of the tip of Indonesia’s Aceh province and Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Thailand and Indonesia have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace.
Malaysia has asked India for help in tracing the aircraft and New Delhi’s coastguard planes have joined the search.
“We will never give up hope” of inning the plane, acting Transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said, adding that the search will continue till authorities find the aircraft.
The flight MH370 that went missing over the South China Sea en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur had 227 passengers on board, including five Indians and one Indian-origin Canadian, and 12 crew members.

Flight MH370 Suspects Identified

Who were the four passengers with suspect identities?

 

Only two are known to have been travelling on stolen passports. Both are thought to be Iranian, probably seeking asylum in Europe, Interpol's secretary general has said.
There was confusion earlier because the Malaysian home minister had described them as appearing to be Asian but was then contradicted by the civil aviation chief, who appeared to suggest that one of the men looked like the black Italian footballer Mario Balotelli. Most journalists present took that to mean that he was black, although the Ministry of Transportation later clarified that the civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, had been trying to emphasise that ethnicity did not indicate nationality.
The Malaysian transport and defence minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said this week that authorities were looking at two more possible cases of suspicious identities, telling reporters: "All the four names are with me."
Malaysian authorities have not given any further information since then. Chinese state media said one of the passport numbers on the manifest belonged to a man from Fujian, eastern China, who was safe and well – but a different name, also Chinese, was listed alongside the number. The man told police that his passport had not been lost or stolen.

What about people who checked in but did not board the flight?

On Monday, the civil aviation chief said five people checked in but did not board and their baggage was removed accordingly. On Tuesday, the inspector general of police said that everyone who was booked on to the flight had boarded - though he then contradicted himself by saying one person had missed the flight because they got the wrong day. Malaysia Airlines says that four people were booked but never checked in.

Malaysian Flight MH370 Still Missing

Malaysian Flight MH370 Still Missing

The mystery of flight MH370

The mystery of flight MH370: How on earth, with all our technology, do we lose a giant plane?

Updated @ 19:30: Very little new information has come to light since this story was first published this morning. Despite some oil slicks and debris being found in the South China Sea, authorities have confirmed that they didn’t originate from the MH370. Numerous experts have attested to the Boeing 777′s excellent reliability and safety record, and puzzlement at how it could vanish from the skies. We still have no idea how or why the plane disappeared, nor where it crashed. There are very, very few reasons for a modern plane to suddenly disappear. Read on for the original story.

Three days ago, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar off the south coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea. 239 people were on board — and at this point, it is presumed that they have all perished in some kind of disaster. A massive search and rescue effort involving 40 ships and 34 aircraft from nine different nations has yet to discover any sign of the missing aircraft. For me, this is almost incomprehensible: Despite all of the awesome technology that mankind has developed, it’s still possible for a Boeing 777-200 with 239 people on board to vanish. For me, it’s mind blowing that all we have to go on is the plane’s radar signature — and even then, that last radar reading was so poor that the search area is thousands of square miles of open water. Surely, given the fact that we can track a damn smartphone anywhere on Earth down to a few meters, there’s a better way of keeping track of missing aircraft?

In the words of Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, the fate of MH370 is “a mystery.” The Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia en route to Beijing, was cruising normally at 35,000 feet… and then disappeared. There was no distress call. The weather was fine. The plane’s last known position, via radar, was just south of Vietnam in the South China Sea — which is where search efforts have been focused so far — but one theory suggests that the plane turned back just after the last radar ping, meaning the plane could be hundreds of miles away in the Strait of Malacca. In the absence of any other information, there is speculation that the plane was target of a terrorist attack.

Flight path and search area for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 [Image credit: BBC]

For me, the most shocking aspect of the MH370 disaster is that we won’t know what fate befell those 239 souls until we find MH370′s Flight Data Recorder (FDR), aka the black box. Except for that last radar reading, we have absolutely no knowledge of the flight at all until we find that FDR. We have no clue what was said in the cockpit by the captain and first officer — though, seemingly, if something did go wrong, they didn’t even have time to send a mayday message. We have no clue if the plane hit a patch of bad weather, or whether it was hijacked. It really will be one huge mystery until the FDR is recovered — and there’s a good chance, if MH370 did crash into the ocean, that the FDR will never be recovered. In the case of Air France flight AF447, which disappeared off the coast of Brazil, it took two months to locate the wreckage, more than a year to find the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), and the FDR was never found.

The FDR has an underwater locator beacon (ULB) that will ping for at least 30 days, and can be detected up to around two miles away, but when you’re talking about a search area consisting of thousands of square miles, and waters that are almost a mile deep on average, finding the black box will be no mean feat. (Read: Worried about black boxes snooping on you? One is in your car already.)

Do we live in the stone age or something?

Inside a modern, solid-state Cockpit Voice Recorder. The Flight Data Recorder is very similar.

So, think about this for a moment. We live in a day and age where GPS (and other radio triangulation methods) can track your smartphone to within a few meters, almost anywhere on Earth. With dedicated, land-based tracking networks, vehicles and devices can be tracked to within a few centimeters. Even in the absence of GPS or radio tracking, inertial guidance (dead reckoning) has been accurate enough since the ’60s to accurately land a nuclear ICBM on the other side of the planet, or put the Apollo mission into space. (Read: Think GPS is cool? IPS will blow your mind.)

And then there’s connectivity. On land, there are networks (both commercial and governmental) that provide data connectivity almost everywhere. Over water is definitely harder, but satellites do provide pretty good coverage — and yes, that particular region of Asia is very well covered by communications satellites. Finally, even if an aircraft is out of satellite/radio coverage, there is absolutely nothing preventing the airplane from transmitting a really juicy low-frequency radio signal that could be picked up thousands of miles away. This is how they communicate with air traffic control, after all.

Why, then, does a plane like the MH370 keep all of its secrets locked up in a black box? Why don’t planes constantly transmit all of their black box data, so that we know their exact location, bearing, altitude, and other important factors, at all times?

The short answer is, there’s no good reason.

• By Sebastian Anthony on March 10, 2014 at 7:36 pm