Kuala Lumpur, April 12 – It has now emerged that a crew member of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 made a desperate call from his mobile phone as the plane was flying low near Penang, the morning it went missing.
According to a report in the Malaysian daily New Straits Times, the latest breakthrough in the ongoing criminal investigation traced the source of the call to co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid’s phone.
The newspaper claimed it has learnt that investigators are poring over this discovery as they try to piece together what had happened moments before the Boeing 777-22ER twinjet went off the radar, some 200 nautical miles (320km) northwest of Penang on March 8.
It is understood that the aircraft with 239 people on board was flying at an altitude low enough for the nearest telecommunications tower to pick up his phone’s signal.
His call, however, ended abruptly, but not before contact was established with a telecommunications sub-station in the state.
The call ended abruptly possibly “because the aircraft was fast moving away from the (telecommunications) tower”, the newspaper said.
Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Investigators last month indicated that the flight was deliberately diverted and its communication systems manually switched off as it was leaving Malaysian airspace, triggering a criminal investigation by police that has revealed little so far.
The fate of flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery, with a number of theories put forward including a hijacking or terrorist attack and a pilot gone rogue.
-India Today
