Malaysia: Files were deleted from pilot's flight simulator
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Investigators are trying to restore files deleted last month from the home flight simulator of the pilot aboard the missing Malaysian plane to see if they shed any light on the disappearance, Malaysia's defense minister said Wednesday.
Hishammuddin Hussein
told a news conference that the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, is
considered innocent until proven guilty of any wrongdoing, and that
members of his family are cooperating in the investigation. Files
containing records of simulations carried out on the program were
deleted Feb. 3, Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu said.
It was not immediately
clear whether investigators thought that deleting the files was
unusual. They will want to check those files for any signs of unusual
flight paths that could help explain where the missing plane went.
Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370 with 239 people aboard disappeared March 8 on a night flight
from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian authorities have not ruled out
any possible explanations, but have said the evidence so far suggests
the flight was deliberately turned back across Malaysia to the Strait of
Malacca, with its communications systems disabled. They are unsure what
happened next and why.
Investigators have
identified two giant arcs of territory spanning the possible positions
of the plane about 7 1/2 hours after takeoff, based on its last faint
signal to a satellite - an hourly "handshake" signal that continues even
when communications are switched off. The arcs stretch up as far as
Kazakhstan in central Asia and down deep into the southern Indian Ocean.
Police are considering
the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to
the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board, and have asked
for background checks from abroad on all foreign passengers.
Hishammuddin said such
checks have been received for all the foreigners except those from
Ukraine and Russia - which account for three passengers. "So far, no
information of significance on any passengers has been found,"
Hishammuddin said.
The 53-year-old pilot
joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981 and had more than 18,000 hours of
flight experience. People who knew Zaharie from his involvement in
opposition political circles in Malaysia and other areas of his life
have described him as sociable, humble, caring and dedicated to his job.
The crisis has exposed
the lack of a failsafe way of tracking modern passenger planes on which
data transmission systems and transponders - which make them visible to
civilian radar - have been severed. At enormous cost, 26 countries are
helping Malaysia look for the plane.
Relatives of
passengers on the missing airliner - two thirds of them from China -
have grown increasingly frustrated over the lack of progress in the
search. Planes sweeping across vast expanses of the Indian Ocean and
satellites peering on Central Asia have turned up no new clues.
"It's really too much.
I don't know why it is taking so long for so many people to find the
plane. It's 12 days," Subaramaniam Gurusamy, 60, said in an interview
from his home on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. His 34-year-old son,
Pushpanathan Subramaniam, was on the flight heading to Beijing for a
work trip.
"He's the one son I have," Subaramaniam said.
Before Wednesday's
news briefing at a hotel near the Kuala Lumpur airport, two Chinese
relatives of passengers held up a banner saying "Truth" in Chinese and
started shouting before security personnel escorted them out.
"I want you to help me to find my son!" one of the two women said.
Hishamuddin announced
that a delegation of Malaysian government officials, diplomats, air
force and civil aviation officials will head to Beijing - where many of
the passengers' relatives are gathered - to give briefings to the next
of kin on the status of the search.
Aircraft from
Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand on Wednesday scoured a search area
stretching across 305,000 square kilometers (117,000 square miles) of
the Indian Ocean, about 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) southwest of
Perth, on Australia's west coast. Merchant ships were also asked to look
for any trace of the plane.
Nothing has been found, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
China has said it was
reviewing radar data and deployed 21 satellites to search the northern
corridor, although it is considered less likely that the plane could
have taken that route without being detected by military radar systems
of the countries in that region.
Those searches so far have turned up no trace of the plane, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.
Indonesian Defense
Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro said Indonesia military radar didn't pick
up any signs of Flight 370 on the day the plane went missing. He said
Malaysia had asked Indonesia to intensify the search in its assigned
zone in the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra, but said his air force was
strained in the task.
"We will do our utmost. We will do our best. But you do have to understand our limitations," Purnomo said.
Hishammuddin said both
the southern and the northern sections of the search area were
important, but that "some priority was being given to that (southern)
area." He didn't elaborate.
Malaysian
investigators say the plane departed 12:41 a.m. on March 8 and headed
northeast toward Beijing over the Gulf of Thailand, but that it turned
back after the final words were heard from the cockpit. Malaysian
military radar data places the plane west of Malaysia in the Strait of
Malacca at 2:14 a.m.
Thailand divulged new
radar data Tuesday that appeared to corroborate Malaysian data showing
the plane crossing back across Peninsular Malaysia.
The military in the
Maldives, a remote Indian Ocean island nation, confirmed to Malaysia
that reports of a sighting of the plane by villagers there were "not
true," the Malaysian defense minister said.
German insurance
company Allianz said Wednesday that it has made initial payments in
connection with the missing plane. Spokesman Hugo Kidston declined to
say how much had been paid, but said it was in line with contractual
obligations when an aircraft is reported as missing.
---
Associated Press
writers Rod McGuirk, Satish Cheney and Chris Brummitt in Kuala Lumpur,
Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney,
Australia, contributed to this report.
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