Maldives residents report seeing low-flying aircraft on day MH370 disappeared
BY LOOI SUE-CHERN
The Maldives, located to the south of India in the Indian Ocean, is within the range that MAS flight MH370 could have reached with the fuel it carried. - The Malaysian Insider graphic, March 18, 2014.
Malaysia
may have to rope in the Maldives for help if it is true that the island nation's residents spotted the missing MH37O on the day it disappeared.
Local news site Haveeru Online reported on Tuesday that residents of Kuda Huvadhoo, a remote Maldives island in Dhaal Atoll saw a "low-flying jumbo jet" on the morning of March 8.
Coincidentally, Bahasa Malaysia newspaper Berita Harian also reported on Tuesday that investigators have found five airport runways, which included the Male International Airport in the Maldives, loaded in MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's homemade flight simulator.
Haveeru Online reported that several residents told the news site that they saw the plane at 6.15am local time (9.15am Malaysian time) on March 8.
The eyewitnesses claimed that the plane, which was white with red stripes, was travelling southeast towards Addu, the southern tip of the Maldives.
They also reported that they heard the incredibly loud noise that the plane made when it flew over the island.
"I've never seen a jet flying so low over our island before. We've seen seaplanes, but I'm sure that this was not one of those. I could even make out the doors on the plane clearly.
"It's not just me either, several other residents have reported seeing the exact same thing. Some people got out of their houses to see what was causing the tremendous noise too," an eyewitness said.
Haveeru Online reported that Kuda Huvadhoo Island councillor Mohamed Zaheem confirmed that the island residents had been talking about theincident.
The news site also quoted a local aviation expert who said that it was "likely" for MH370 to have flown over the Maldives.
The search for MH370 now covers 2.24 million square nautical miles over two areas - the northern corridor from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and the southern stretch from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean - after satellite and military data projected that the plane might have flown over the huge areas.
The Maldives is located in the Indian Ocean some 400km southwest of India.
So far, its government has not been asked to assist in the multinational search efforts to find the missing Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, which has 239 people onboard, the news site reported.
MH370 has been missing for 12 days since it dropped off the radar on March 8, some 40 minutes after it left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing.
Investigations have revealed that the plane was deliberately diverted from its original route, although it is still unknown who was behind it and what was the person's motive.
The missing aircraft's pilot Captain Zaharie, a 53-year-old with over 18,000 hours of flying time who built his own flight simulator at home, and first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, are being probed by the police to help shed light into the mystery of flight MH370.
source : mi
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