Authorities focus on passenger in search for missing plane
Authorities looking into the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane are focusing on a flight engineer.
The 29 year-old was one of the passengers.
Malaysian authorities say that 26 countries are now involved in the search for the aircraft, after France joined the operation.
The pilot's flight simulator is being analysed at Police Headquarters, after being seized at his home.
Malaysia's Defence Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein says they have been in touch with all countries involved.
Malaysia said searches have begun in both the northern and southern corridors of a vast swathe of Asia where the missing jet is believed to have ended up.
Minister Hussein said that Kazakhstan also joined the search today, in the furthest north-west section of the search area.
Australia has taken the lead in searching for the missing Boeing 777 over the southern Indian Ocean today.
The move came as Malaysia appealed for radar data and search planes to help in the unprecedented hunt through a vast swath of Asia stretching north-west into Kazakhstan.
Investigators say Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was deliberately diverted and its communications equipment switched off shortly after take-off during an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. Suspicion has fallen on anyone on board the plane with aviation experience, in particular the pilot and co-pilot.
Malaysian police confiscated a flight simulator from the home of the pilot on Saturday and also visited the home of the co-pilot, in what Malaysia’s police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said was the first visit to their homes. The government issued a statement today contradicting that account by saying that police first visited the pilots’ homes on March 9, the day after the flight.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament that he agreed to take the lead in scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the “ill-fated aircraft” during a conversation today with Malaysia’s leader Najib Razak. Australia already had two AP-3C Orion aircraft involved in the search, one of them looking north and west of the remote Cocos Islands.
Malaysian authorities have said the satellite signal or “ping” received from the jet carrying 239 people more than seven hours after it took off shows that it also may have entered a northern corridor stretching over land from south-east Asia north-west into central Asia.
