After more than eight years, new evidence has been discovered in the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 case. As per a media report, a landing gear door of the ill-fated plane was found by a Madagascan fisherman and it suggests that the pilot “deliberately downed” the aircraft on March 8, 2014, that claimed the lives of 239 passengers onboard.
According to a report in Independent, the landing gear door was found at the home of a fisherman named Tataly 25 days back. Experts believe that this material evidence shows that the pilots “intended to destroy” the plane.
Independent quoted British engineer Richard Godfrey and an American MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson as saying that the aircraft was “deliberately crashed”.
“The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item lead to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible. The crash of MH370 was anything but a soft landing on the ocean,” Godfrey was quoted as saying.
In 2017, the fisherman found the landing gear door after it came up on the Madagascar shore due to tropical storm Fernando. He kept it with him for five years without knowing its significance and his wife used the door as a washing board.
“The combination of the high speed impact designed to break up the aircraft and the extended landing gear designed to sink the aircraft as fast as possible both show a clear intent to hide the evidence of the crash,” Independent quoted a report published by the experts as saying.
Relatives of the passengers have kept calling for a fresh search to find the aircraft.
What Happened on March 8, 2014?
The Beijing-bound plane disappeared off the radar about 40 minutes after take-off from Kuala Lumpur when someone had turned off the communication systems and changed the aircraft’s route, according to an official report.
The investigation concluded that the plane crashed in a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean, where 232,000 kilometers of the sea bed have since been combed unsuccessfully in search operations.
So far, fragments or suspected fragments of the aircraft have been recovered from beaches in Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, South Africa, and Pemba Island (Zanzibar).
Malaysia, Australia, and China, who carried out the first search at a cost of over $151 million, agreed to suspend it in January 2017 until the appearance of new solid evidence.
The US-based seabed exploration company Ocean Infinity, which conducted a second search which also yielded no result, offered to carry out another under the same no-find no-fee conditions.
‘Mass Murder-Suicide by Pilot’
In February, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott claimed that the MH370 flight was downed by a suicidal pilot. Citing the “highest levels” of the Malaysian government sources, Abbott had told Sky News that the authorities thought “from very, very early on” that the MH370 jet was crashed intentionally by its pilot.
“My understanding, my very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian Government is that from very, very early on here they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot,” Abbott was quoted as saying.
“Let me reiterate – I want to be absolutely crystal clear – it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot,” he added.
Abbott, who was Prime Minister at the time of tragedy, had spoke in detail about his conversations with Malaysian leaders for the first time in a Sky News documentary titled “MH370: The Untold Story,” that was set to be aired on Wednesday.
Najib Razak, prime minister of Malaysia at that time, had told online news portal Free Malaysia that they never ruled out the possibility of a murder suicide angle. “It would have been deemed unfair and legally irresponsible since the black boxes and cockpit voice recorders had not been found and hence, there was no conclusive proof whether the pilot was solely or jointly responsible,” Najib was quoted as saying.
“I must stress that this possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations, where no effort was spared,” he added.
(with inputs from agencies)
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