KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 — The plane recorded by military radar turning around east of Kota Baru, Kelantan before flying west of Penang is almost certain to be missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, investigators now believe.

A person in the United States who has studied the raw data captured by the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) and released by Malaysia said the triangulation of the plane’s location using two separate radar stations confirms its identity.

In a New York Times report yesterday, the newspaper cited the unnamed source as saying that the radar plot captured by a military radar station in Kota Baru was corroborated by a second data point caught by the RMAF base in Butterworth.

The RMAF base last captured a radar plot of the plane at 2.15am on March 8, when it was at 29,500 feet.

The Beijing-bound plane with 239 people onboard stopped contacting ground control 45 minutes earlier, less than an hour after it departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Today, local daily the New Straits Times cited a “highly-placed source” as saying that MH370 had continued to “squawk” as it veered off course from its path to Beijing, further supporting the radar information.

“The reason why we can safely say that the unidentified contact was MH370 is because when it made that turnback, it was still squawking its IDENT number (MH370) and this was registered on the radar screen, meaning that the transponder was still on.”

“This was because it (the squawk code) was clearly there even after it made the turn. Later, the blip was still there but it wasn't squawking any more. The transponder must have gone off,” the unnamed source was quoted as saying.

With the mounting evidence, investigators are now zeroing in on foul play as the possible reason for the plane’s mysterious disappearance.

“Everything we have heard is consistent with the plane flying under the control of someone with at least some flying experience,” an anonymous US aviation industry executive told the NYT.

The new information indicates that search and rescue efforts may have been directed in the wrong location east of Malaysia in the days following the plane’s disappearance.

It also suggests that search teams will now have to trawl the haystack that is the Indian Ocean — the third largest in the world — for the needle that is MH370.