Malaysia has never ruled out the possibility that flight MH370 was brought down deliberately by a suicidal pilot, the country’s former prime minister said today.
Najib Razak said officials had considered the chance of a ‘murder-suicide’ but had not made their suspicions public because of a lack of evidence.
Former Australian leader Tony Abbott brought the claim into the spotlight yesterday when he claimed Malaysian officials were privately voicing the theory within days of the plane’s disappearance.
Najib and Abbott were the leaders of their respective countries when the Malaysian Airlines jet vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014 with 239 people on board.
The family of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah has long rejected the claim that he might have downed the plane in a deliberate, suicidal act.
A report in 2018 found that the plane was manually turned around in mid-air, but investigators did not rule out ‘intervention by a third party’.
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak (pictured in May 2014) has said his country never ruled out the possibility that flight MH370 was crashed deliberately
A Malaysian Airlines jet on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur in March 2014, when flight MH370 vanished over the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board
‘My very clear understanding from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here, they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot,’ Abbott said in a Sky News documentary yesterday.
‘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.’
Responding to Abbott, Najib told online news portal Free Malaysia Today that officials had chosen to keep their suspicions private during the investigation.
‘It would have been deemed unfair and legally irresponsible since the black boxes and cockpit voice recorders had not been found and hence, there was no conclusive proof whether the pilot was solely or jointly responsible,’ Najib was quoted as saying.
‘Again I must stress that this possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations, where no effort was spared.’
Najib said there were several reasons for authorities to suspect Zaharie’s involvement.
They included his ownership of a home flight simulator and findings that MH370’s transponders were switched off shortly after the plane left Malaysian airspace.
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott claims he was told it was a mass murder-suicide just a week after the plane’s disappearance
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot-in-command when the plane carrying 239 other passengers and crew vanished in March 2014
However, the deliberate crash theory is only one of a range of theories which were sparked by the plane’s disappearance – some of them outlandish.
Zaharie’s family and friends have long strongly rejected the ‘murder-suicide’ claims as baseless.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the former head of Malaysia’s civil aviation regulator, criticised Abbott’s remarks and said there was not sufficient proof.
‘It is only a theory. You do this speculation and it will hurt the next of kin,’ he said.
‘The family of the pilot will also feel very bad because you are making an accusation without any proof.’
Most of the passengers were Chinese, while six were Australian.
The flight was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared on March 8, 2014.
French gendarmes and police inspect a large piece of plane debris which was found on the beach in Saint-Andre, on the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, July 29, 2015
A Boeing 777 flaperon cut down to match the one from flight MH370 found on Reunion island off the coast of Africa in 2015, is lowered into water to discover its drift characteristics by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation researchers in Tasmania
Malaysia, China, and Australia, called off a two-year, £100million underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2017 after finding no trace of the aircraft.
Abbott has now called for new exploration of the ocean, although the countries agreed in 2016 that an official search would only resume if there was credible evidence to locate the wreckage.
A second three-month search, led by American firm Ocean Infinity, ended similarly in May 2018.
The 2018 investigative report said there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress in the two pilots and none of the passengers had pilot training.
However, investigators say the cause of the disappearance cannot be fully determined until the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes are found.
Their failure to come up with any firm conclusions in the 2018 report left relatives of presumed victims angry and disappointed at the time.
Najib was defeated in a general election in 2018, and is now facing corruption charges. He denies them.