According to a Fox News report citing unnamed US law enforcement officials, FBI agents in Malaysia made the request to the bureau’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia for the computer forensics team to extract the information.

The simulator was retrieved from the home of MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah on March 15, the same day Malaysia announced that it was all but certain that the disappearance of the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 with 239 onboard a week earlier was due to deliberate action.

On Wednesday, Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters that an examination of the flight simulator revealed that it contained three aviation programmes.

“The three games in the simulator were ‘Flight Simulator X’, ‘Flight Simulator IX’, ‘X-flight 10’,” he told the daily press conference on the updates on the MH370 search and rescue operation.

The two “Flight Simulator” titles are published by Microsoft and marketed to the public.

During the press conference, Khalid also revealed that the data logs of all three games were wiped out on February 3.

The Fox News report did not specify when FBI investigators expect to receive the simulator to allow them to extract the information and analyse other contents.

On Wednesday, Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein reminded the public that all 239 people onboard MH370 remain innocent until proven guilty.

It is virtually certain that the FBI will recover the deleted data, which will help shed light on whether any of the routes flown on the simulator mirrored the two flight arcs the missing plane might have taken.

Yesterday, Malay-language daily reported local investigators as saying the flight simulator taken from Zaharie’s home had contained the locations of five runways in the Indian Ocean, which is a possible location of the missing plane based on satellite data.

This information was not corroborated by investigators.

Malaysia law enforcement officials previously informed the US counterparts that nothing suspicious was found on the personal computers of both Zaharie and his co-pilot, Fariq Ab Hamid.

The search for the missing plane has now been missing for nearly two weeks continues along two “corridors”, but satellite images of debris 2,500km off Western Australia is the “best lead” investigators have at the moment of finding the aircraft and its passengers.