KUALA LUMPUR, (Reuters) – An international land and sea search for a missing Malaysian jetliner is covering an area the size of Australia, authorities said yesterday, but police and intelligence agencies have yet to establish a clear motive to explain its disappearance.
Investigators are convinced that someone with deep knowledge of the Boeing 777-200ER and commercial navigation diverted Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, carrying 12 crew and 227 mainly Chinese passengers, perhaps thousands of miles off its scheduled course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
But intensive background checks of everyone aboard have so far failed to find anyone with a known political or criminal motive to hijack or deliberately crash the plane, Western security sources and Chinese authorities said.
With the plane missing for 10 days, German insurer Allianz said yesterday it had started making payments on claims linked to the jetliner.
Malaysian Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference the “unique, unprecedented” search covered a total area of 2.24 million nautical miles (7.68 million sq km), from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean.
Flight MH370 vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia’s east coast less than an hour after take-off early on March 8.
Investigators piecing together patchy data from military radar and satellites believe that someone turned off the aircraft’s identifying transponder and ACARS system, which transmits maintenance data, and turned west, re-crossing the Malay Peninsula and following a commercial aviation route towards India.
Malaysian officials have backtracked on the exact sequence of events. They are now unsure whether the ACARS system was shut down before or after the last radio message was heard from the cockpit – but said that did not make a material difference.
