KUALA LUMPUR, May 29 — Today’s admission by Australian officials that the southern Indian Ocean area where pings were detected is not the crash site of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been described as evidence of “a giant cover-up” by some distraught family members of those on board the missing airliner.
Sarah Bajc told The Malay Mail Online that the new “twist” is “consistent with the tangled mess that is this supposed investigation”.
Bajc, partner of Philip Wood, and Pralhad, whose wife Kranti is still missing along with the rest of the people on board, alleged that the latest revelation that the plane was not in the southern Indian Ocean, was part of a consistent effort by several countries in hiding the truth.
“This cover up is demonstrated through initial delays in search and rescue, their statements, preliminary report with manipulated or incomplete information, delayed realise of manipulated and incomplete Inmarsat data, contradicting statements from Mr Najib and Mr Hishammuddin and not declaring complete cargo manifest, which has raised several doubts,” Pralhad told The Malay Mail Online via e-mail.
He alleged that the search in the southern Indian Ocean was to distract the families and the media from the truth.
“It is obvious that when search is going on in middle of ocean no families or media will go there to see.
“This is a perfectly planned disappearance of MH370 and cover up by involved countries,” said the country director for an Irish non-government organisation, Concern Worldwide, in India.
Bajc meanwhile questioned why it was so hard to convince the public that search and rescue efforts for the missing plane and its passengers has been a “giant cover up”, pointing to possible links to weapons of mass destruction.
She also made references to Valerie Plame — the woman who claimed senior officials from the Bush Administration led to the exposure of her status as a CIA operative — and Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor who had leaked troves of confidential material.
Earlier today, Australia’s authorities declared it is ending the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the southern Indian Ocean.
They came to that conclusion after deepsea hunts using a drone submersible have not been able to detect any trace of aircraft debris in more than 850 square kilometres of the ocean floor in the area.
The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), headed by retired Australian air marshal Angus Houston, said the underwater sub Bluefin-21 had completed its last mission searching the remaining areas where the several “ pings” believed to have originated from the missing passenger plane had been detected in early April.
“As a result, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre can advise that no signs of aircraft debris have been found by the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle since it joined the search effort.
“The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered complete and in its professional judgement, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place of MH370,” the statement said.
The JACC statement however said it was not giving up the underwater hunt for the plan but moving on to the next phase, which will involve a review of all data and analyses covering up to 60,000 square kilometres along the arc in the southern Indian Ocean; carrying out a bathymetric survey to map the sea floor and hiring the specialist services needed for a comprehensive search of the defined area.
Bajc told The Malay Mail Online that she has been repeating to herself since the first week of the disappearance that the families of those on board were being “managed and intentionally distracted”.
“Until 3 months later there is not a single solitary fact or piece of evidence that has been proven to be true. not one. Both the leads and the redactions come from a mix of official sources and “leaks”.
“Nothing is logical or consistent or according to standard expected protocols much less common sense. No organisation, not even the Malaysian government, is that inept and ignorant,” she said.
The economics and business teacher at a British high school in Beijing, China, said even the preliminary report released by the Malaysian government on May 1 was “so obviously full of holes as to appear to be intentionally so.”
“They give three different ‘last heard from’ times, in writing that just screams intentional incompetence to me. The most basic of factual data, that would be open public record in most places, has been withheld.”
“The superpowers have been inordinately quiet. The information that is released is manipulated,” Bajc said.
The new revelation came as two spokesmen from the US Navy issued conflicting statements on the ping signals at the centre of the search for MH370 in the last two days, with one saying the signals did not originate from the Malaysian aircraft while the second official later said the earlier observation was “speculative and premature”.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft went missing shortly after departing Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing on March 8 and remains missing despite an international search involving over two dozen countries.
The Beijing-bound plane was ferrying 12 crew and 227 passengers.
It was detailed analysis of satellite and radar data that led experts to believe that MH370 had gone down in the southern Indian Ocean, a theory that at first did not sit well with the families of those aboard the ill-fated jetliner as it showed a drastic diversion to the plane’s original flight path.
