Eleven days after contact was lost with Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and its 239 passengers and crew, there has been minimal progress in determining precisely what happened or where the plane ended up.
Lending fresh weight to the belief that the plane was deliberately diverted, the New York Times reported that the first turn it made off its flight path was programmed into the Boeing 777′s computer navigation system, probably by someone in the cockpit.
Rather than manually operating the plane’s controls, whoever altered Flight 370′s path typed seven or eight keystrokes into a computer situated between the captain and the co-pilot, the newspaper said, quoting US officials.
The head of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said he was unable to confirm the report.
“The aircraft was programmed to fly to Beijing … (but) once you are in the aircraft, anything is possible,” he told a daily press briefing.
Two thirds of those on board were Chinese, and Malaysia had asked authorities in Beijing to run an exhaustive background check on all their nationals as part of a probe into everyone aboard.
Particular attention was paid to a passenger from China’s Muslim ethnic Uighur minority.
On Tuesday China’s ambassador to Malaysia Huang Huikang said no evidence had been found that would link anyone to a possible hijacking or terrorist attack on the jet.
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