Documents claim MH370 captain may have deliberately brought down plane
Confidential documents reportedly claim the pilot of flight MH370 had conducted a simulated flight deep into the southern Indian Ocean, one month before the plane vanished under strikingly similar circumstances.
The findings published by New York magazine claim to back evidence that Zaharie Ahmad Shah made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.
Zaharie was at the helm of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, which is believed to have gone off route and crashed into the Indian Ocean.
The magazine claims documents show the highly respected airman, used a home-built flight simulator to steer himself over the Strait of Malacca and into the remote southern Indian Ocean.
The course is a similar path to what is believed the MH370 was believed to have taken.
The findings have cast a shadow of suspicion over the pilot, 53, after a confidential document from Malaysian police investigating the incident was released.
The document claims the FBI had recovered six deleted data points from Zaharie’s Microsoft Flight Simulator X program.
Each point recorded the plane’s altitude, speed, direction of flight, and other key parameters.
The points reportedly showed a flight that departs Kuala Lumpur, heads over the Malacca Strait, turns left and heads south over the Indian Ocean – continuing until fuel exhaustion over the remote body of water.
“We found a flight path, that led to the southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the flight simulator, that could be of interest,” the document claimed, according to New York magazine.
The simulated flight’s endpoint is located some 1,450km from the area where the plane is believed to have gone down.
Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.
The mystery behind the disappearance of the Boeing 777 is one of the greatest in aviation history.
At the time of the disappearance Zaharie came under fire following reports that he was upset over a jail sentence handed to Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim hours before the plane took off.
It was also claimed he was struggling with mental health issues due to personal problems and was possibly suicidal.
Despite the claims, friends and family of the pilot have strongly rejected them as false.
The news of the simulated flight came on the same day Malaysia, Australia and China announced that hope of finding the missing flight’s final resting place was “fading”.
News break – July 24
