KUALA LUMPUR, March 17 — No “terrorist chatter” has been picked up by US intelligence agencies on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 so far, US House Intelligence Committee member Peter King said.
King told the ABC programme “This Week” that while the focus of investigations on the missing jet should have been on the pilot and co-pilot from the start, he said there still has been no indication as yet that MH370 had been taken by terrorists.
“There’s nothing out there indicating it’s terrorists. Doesn’t mean it’s not, but so far nothing has been picked up by the intelligence community from day one,” said the chairman of the US House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-intelligence and Terrorism.
King appeared critical of Malaysia’s handling of the crisis and said he wished more US investigators were involved, listing out the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as an example.
“If this is going to be a criminal investigation as far as those, the pilot and the co-pilot, we should use as much international law enforcement as possible.
“The FBI is the best at that… again Interpol, a basic unit should be used. Malaysia, for whatever reason, has been resisting. There’s obviously something with the pilot and the co-pilot and that has to be drilled down on,” he said.
The Malaysian-led investigation team on MH370 has refocused its probe on the missing plane to the backgrounds of the 239 people on board, after evidence retrieved from military radars and satellite data indicated that the aircraft had been deliberately flown off-course.
At a press conference on Saturday, one full week after MH370 went missing, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the Boeing 777 was diverted deliberately after someone on board switched off the plane’s communications systems, an act which experts say would require extensive flight experience.
Flight MH370 disappeared from civilian radar some 40 minutes after it departed Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing at 12.41am on March 8 with 239 people onboard.
On Saturday, police also searched the Shah Alam homes of MH370 pilots Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid, taking a flight simulator the former hand-built to mimic that of the Boeing 777-200ER that is now the subject of an international hunt by 25 countries.
But investigators refused to say if they were narrowing down the probe to the two aviators, even as more law enforcement voices across the globe conclude that the technical knowledge of the Boeing and the “tactical evasive manoeuvres” it made after it went dark were likely available only to one or both men at the helm.
During yesterday’s press conference at the Sama Sama Hotel in Sepang, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar appeared to suggest that investigators were ready to discount foul play on the part of the passengers, saying that all 227 were cleared by “some” security agencies, notably those from India and China.
Khalid also said the investigation was now classified under Section 130C of the Penal Code that deals with hijacking, sabotage, and other acts of terrorism.
As pressure grew on detectives to focus their attention on the pilots, however, Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein volunteered a possibly crucial fact: Malaysia Airlines said the two men did not request to fly on MH370.
Colleagues of both pilots also vehemently protest their innocence, rejecting outright any possibility that either man may have anything to do with the plane’s disappearance.
As investigations into the motive for the plane’s disappearance accelerated, so did the search for the aircraft now gone for more than a week.
