According to a confidential document about the disappearance of the flight, Zaharie Ahmad Shah conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote Indian Ocean a few weeks before the MH370 went missing.
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The document reportedly obtained by NY magazine stated that forensic analysis of the five hard disk drives seized from Shah’s home-built flight simulator showed that he had practised the suicide route leading to a remote area in the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the actual disappearance of the flight.
The simulated flight was made less than one month before MH370 went missing with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014.
The finding, which casts a shadow of suspicion over the 53-year-old pilot, was published Friday by NY magazine, which obtained a confidential document from Malaysian police investigating the incident.
“While acknowledging the significance of the debris, ministers noted that to date, none of it had provided information that positively identified the precise location of the aircraft”, the ministers said.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai, in a press conference on Saturday, stressed it “does not mean we have given up on looking for MH370”. “We found a flight itinerary, among others, leading to the southern Indian Ocean, something that could be interesting”, says the document.
The simulator flight information revealed in the NY report shows a flightpath eerily similar to the one the missing plane is believed to have flown. The oceanographer whose calculations helped an American adventurer find potential debris from Flight 370 said Thursday that the Malaysia Airlines jetliner could have crashed slightly north of the current search area. This disappearance remains one of the greatest mysteries in the history of civil aviation.
Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an opposition activist in Malaysia.
But the ATSB has previously said wreckage found on the southwestern shores of the Indian Ocean was consistent with the plane crashing in the expansive search area. In addition, the Dutch company in charge of the underwater search Flight MH370 suggested that perhaps the plane may not have hit the water in a dive, but possibly a glide in its final moments.
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Australia’s Shadow Transport Minister Anthony Albanese questioned the legitimacy of the search zone now being combed by the government, and wants all documents relating to the missing flight to be made public by the Turnbull government, Xinhua news agency reported.
