Search for MH370: Investigation focused on pilots, crew members

The search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane complete a month, with developments increasingly pointing to the fact that MH370 was diverted deliberately. “MH370’s movements were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane,” Malaysia’s acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Tuesday night, adds the report. [caption id=“attachment_1430573” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A woman taking a photo of a screen displaying the number of hours since a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet had gone missing at a mall in Beijing, China. AP [/caption] The determination that the change of course was delibrate, the focus of the investigation shifted to the cabin crew members and pilots. Authorities are looking at 53-year-old captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his co-pilot, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid. But the police say their investigation into the men has failed to turn up any red flags. The FBI helped Malaysian authorities analyse data from Zaharie’s personal flight simulator but found nothing suspicious. Search teams in the southern Indian Ocean are in a race against time to locate the plane’s black box recorder, which has an expected battery life of around 30 days and may well contain the key to understanding the plane’s mysterious disappearance. “We are focusing on the pilots but we can’t get much clarity until we have the black box,” one senior police source told Reuters. National police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said that passengers had been cleared of possible involvement in hijacking, sabotage or having personal or psychological problems that could have been connected to the flight’s disappearance on 8 March.  While authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the disappearance, Khalid today warned that the mystery may never be solved. “Investigations may go on and on and on. We have to clear every little thing,” Khalid said. “At the end of the investigations, we may not even know the real cause. We may not even know the reason for this incident.” The flight which was carrying 239 people went missing on 8 March and the disappearance has remained unexplained ever since. So far the multinational search has yielded no results, with no wreckage spotted despite almost a month of searching. With inputs from Agencies