KUALA LUMPUR, July 15 — Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah lacked the ingenuity needed to plot the disappearance of Flight MH370, his sister has said amid continued scrutiny on the aircrew in the hunt for the plane now missing for over four months.
Speaking for the first time since the mysterious disappearance of the Boeing 777 on March 8, Sakinab Ahmad Shah defended her brother’s name and insisted it was “impossible’ that the experienced aviator hijacked the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.
In a documentary aired on Channel NewsAsia over the weekend, Sakinab spoke of the incredulity in the family over the suspicion that befell Zaharie following the plane’s disappearance.
“We couldn’t figure out why somebody who would want to commit suicide would prolong the agony of flying for four, five, six hours just to land down there,” she said on the Singapore-based channel’s latest mini-clip titled “The Mystery of MH370”.
“If it was done, if he was the one who planned it, he has to be some kind of Einstein, which he was not,” said Sakinab.
Among the main focus of investigators is the background of all the 239 people on board the red-eye flight that disappeared shortly after taking off from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Malaysian police are still looking at the possibility of a hijack, terrorism or even “pilot suicide” after the passenger jetliner was shown to have “deliberately” veered off-course towards the waters of the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometres away from the plane’s original flight path to Beijing.
Zaharie became the chief suspect after investigators disclosed that someone had purposely shut off the plane’s transponder and performance reporting system in an apparent effort to mask its location as it flew off-course.
The final air-to-ground radio transmission was also believe to be made by the pilot.
The police have repeatedly questioned Zaharie’s family and seized a flight simulator hand-built to mimic that of the Boeing 777-200ER’s controls from his house.
The families of his co-pilot Fariq Ab Hamid and other cabin crew have also been questioned but no evidence has emerged to implicate anyone.
MAS’s commercial director, Hugh Dunleavy, previously came out to reject the theory stressing that the captain was a seasoned pilot with an excellent record.
In the documentary, Sakinab concurred with the assessment of Zaharie’s employers.
“It is impossible it’s him… we are left suspended mid-air with all kinds of speculations,” she said of the avid aviator..
“He was just a man who took so much to aviation. He loved aviation, he spent a lot of his funds buying model airplanes.
“If he could, I think he would attach wings to himself and fly... he loved flying that much,” she related.
Investigators have yet to pinpoint the location of MH370’s final resting place, despite months of frantic searching by international teams..
The hunt has been scaled back to an undersea operation in the southern Indian Ocean west of Australia that is expected to take between eight to 12 months.
