KUALA LUMPUR, April 10 — The Speaker of the Lower House of parliament today shot down opposition demands that Deputy Defence Minister Datuk Abdul Rahim Bakri be reprimanded for misleading parliament by suggesting that the missing Malaysian airliner could have been ordered to divert from its Beijing-bound flight path.

Dewan Rakyat Speaker Tan Sri Pandikar Mulia Amin Pandikar said Abdul Rahim will not be referred to the Parliamentary Privileges Committee as for an unintentionally misleading statement to Dewan Rakyat.

The speaker cited the deputy minister’s apology on March 27 when he admitted that he made an inaccurate assumption about why the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 made the sudden turnaround.

Abdul Rahim, who is also Kudat MP, told the Lower House on March 26 that the jetliner 239 people may have turned back after receiving orders from the control centre.

“This was his assumption. I have taken that into consideration, and I believe he did not intend to mislead the House,” Pandikar said.

The deputy defence minister’s apology drew strong criticism from the opposition who described Abdul Rahim’s statement as highly irresponsible.

Questions had been raised over the military’s failure to immediately report the detection of the missing plane, but Abdul Rahim repeated the Malaysian government’s explanation that the aircraft was considered non-hostile.

“The turnback was detected in our radar, only we thought the turnback was done by MAS, an aircraft that was not hostile or a friendly aircraft, so we thought maybe it’s an order from control tower,” the Kudat MP said during his ministry’s winding up speech of the Royal Address on March 27.

MH370, a large wide-body Boeing 777 aircraft carrying 239 people, first disappeared from civilian radar at 1.30am on March 8, shortly after it left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA).

Initial search operations were concentrated on the South China Sea and the waters between Malaysia and Vietnam as the aircraft was last spotted 120 nautical miles off the coast of Kota Baru.

On March 9, the search was expanded to the Straits of Malacca, while Vietnam authorities briefly scaled down their efforts after the search was expanded to the Andaman Sea on March 12.

On March 12, local authorities confirmed that military radar had spotted an aircraft northwest from Penang in the Straits of Malacca at 2.15am on the same day it went missing, but  they could not ascertain that  it was flight MH370.

In a press conference on March 13, Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) chief Tan Sri Rodzali Daud explained that Malaysia was still working with experts to confirm if aircraft was indeed the missing MH370.

Although Rodzali said the plane was then considered non-hostile, he did not elaborate.

In the same March 13 press conference, Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman explained that the primary radar used by the military gives no other information and only shows the presence of an aircraft.

Civil aviation radars are secondary radars which receive information from aircraft transponders showing the type of aircraft along with other identification details.

On March 15, the search in the South China Sea was called off after satellite data suggested that the MH370 could be either in a northern corridor that stretched into Central Asia or a southern corridor that went over the Indian Ocean.

As new information appeared based on analysis of satellite data, Malaysia announced the conclusion on March 24 that the flight MH370 was assumed to be lost in the Indian Ocean.

The multinational search for the MH370 and the 239 people on board is still going on.