Monday, March 17, 2014

Malaysian authorities not eager for US help in plane disappearance, US not invited to know details about flight simulator removed from pilot's home-NY Times. Malaysia asks for Australian assistance-BBC

.
3/17/14, "Australia leads southern search for missing plane," BBC
---------------------------------------

3/16/14, "As U.S. Looks for Terror Links in Plane Case, Malaysia Rejects Extensive Help," NY Times,



There are just two F.B.I. agents in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, where local investigators are hunting for clues that the two pilots or any of the other 237 people on board had links to militant groups or other motives to hijack the flight. 

In the days after the plane went missing on March 8, American investigators scoured their huge intelligence databases for information about those on board but came up dry.

We just don’t have the right to just take over the investigation,” said a senior American official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “There’s not a whole lot we can do absent of a request from them for more help or a development that relates to information we may have.”... 

A central puzzle is why anyone would hijack a jetliner and then fly it for hours over the open ocean, as seems to be the most likely case. On Saturday, the Malaysian authorities opened a criminal inquiry after learning that two tracking devices aboard the aircraft had been turned off several minutes apart, indicating deliberate action, and that the plane appeared to have flown for as long as seven hours more....

Several senior American officials have played down the possibility that a terrorist network was behind the plane’s disappearance because no group has claimed responsibility for it. They said intelligence agencies had not detected chatter among terrorists about such a plot....

In response to the news that Malaysian authorities had taken a flight simulator from the chief pilot’s home, American officials said that they were eager to know what the investigators had found and were willing to help search the computers. But as of Sunday afternoon, the officials said they knew little about the findings....

“If it is a criminal act where the pilot decided to crash the airliner, there is little the U.S. can do,” said Rick Nelson, vice president of business  development at Cross Match Technologies and a former senior counterterrorism official. “It’s very difficult to stop someone who one day decides to crash a plane. It is difficult to predict and to mitigate.”

The F.B.I., which has had an agent based at the United States Embassy in Kuala Lumpur for more than a decade, has developed a working relationship with law enforcement officials there in recent years. But American officials said they believed that the Malaysian leaders had rebuffed their offers of assistance because they did not want to appear as though they needed help with such a high-profile investigation.

Because two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese, one group with a conceivable motive to hijack the plane would be militant members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic group in China. Malaysian and Chinese news reports identified one passenger as Uighur, but American officials said they had no evidence that the passenger was associated with militant groups."...

=============================

3/17/14, "Australia leads southern search for missing plane," BBC

"Australia will take control of the "southern vector" search for the missing Malaysian plane, its PM says, as a multinational effort continues. 

Malaysian officials say the plane was intentionally diverted and could have flown on either a northern or southern arc from its last known position.

Australian PM Tony Abbott said he was responding to Malaysia's request and would add more resources to the search....

Malaysian officials said on Sunday that the last words from the cockpit - "All right, good night" - came after the the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits key information about the plane to the ground, had been deliberately switched off.

On Saturday police searched the homes of Captain Zaharie Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid. Investigators are also looking at passengers, engineers and other ground staff who may have had contact with the aircraft before take-off.
 
The plane, which left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 00:40 local time (16:40 GMT) on 8 March, disappeared off air traffic controllers' screens at about 01:20.

Investigators are trying to obtain more radar and satellite data from any of the countries that the plane may have passed over, with its 239 crew and passengers. 

Mr Abbott told parliament on Monday that Malaysian Prime Minister Nazib Razak asked Australia to "take responsibility for the search on the southern vector, which the Malaysian authorities now think was one possible flight path for this ill-fated aircraft".

"I agreed that we would do so. I offered the Malaysian prime minister additional maritime surveillance resources which he gratefully accepted."


The southern search area covers the Indian Ocean."


.

No comments: