The “top levels” of the Malaysian government have long suspected that the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 nearly six years ago was an act of mass murder-suicide by the pilot, Australia’s former prime minister said in an explosive interview that aired Wednesday.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished March 8, 2014, and is presumed to have crashed in the far southern Indian Ocean. A safety report into the disaster by an international team in July 2018 revealed the plane was likely steered off course deliberately by someone and flown for several hours after communications were severed.
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was in office when the flight vanished, told Sky News that high-ranking Malaysian officials believed veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately downed the jet.
“My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very, very early on they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott told Sky News.
Abbott, who was Australia’s prime minister from 2013-15, made the comments in the first part of a Sky News documentary “MH370: The Untold Story” that is airing Wednesday and Thursday.
“I’m not going to say who said what to whom, but let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot, mass-murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott said in the interview that aired Wednesday.
In the July 2019 issue of The Atlantic, writer and aviation specialist William Langewiesche delved into what happened to the missing aircraft, including a look at Shah, who had “indications of trouble.” The night the aircraft went missing, control was seized in the cockpit during a 20-minute period between 1:01 a.m. and 1:21 a.m. and radar records show the autopilot was probably switched off, according to Langewiesche.
When the report by a 19-member international team was released in July 2019, chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said during a media briefing there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress among the two pilots – Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid – that could lead them to hijack the plane.
