Malaysia plane probe ends in mystery

HONG KONG — One of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time deepened Monday when the official government inquiry into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 released a 495-page report that gave no definitive answers as to the fate of the airliner.

The plane was heading north from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, when it deviated from its scheduled path, turning west across the Malay Peninsula.

It is believed to have turned south after radar contact was lost and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean after running out of fuel.

No significant pieces of the wreckage of the jetliner, a Boeing 777, have ever been found; nor have any remains of the 239 people on board.

The report offered no conclusion on what caused the plane to veer off course, cease radio communications and vanish.

The head of the safety investigation team, Kok Soo Chon, said the available evidence — including the plane’s deviation from its flight course, which tests showed was done manually rather than by autopilot, and the switching off of a transponder — “irresistibly point” to “unlawful interference,” which could mean the plane was hijacked.

But he added that the panel found no indication of who might have interfered or why, and that any criminal inquiry would be the responsibility of law enforcement authorities, not safety investigators.

While Kok did not directly address theories that the disappearance was the result of pilot suicide, he said investigators were “not of the opinion that it could have been an event committed by the pilot.”