REPORT: LONG-MISSING PLANE COULD HAVE BEEN HIJACKED

Putrajaya, Malaysia — A Malaysian-led independent investigation report released Monday, more than four years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, highlighted shortcomings in the government’s response and raised the possibility of “intervention by a third party.”

The report, prepared by a 19-member team, reiterated Malaysia’s assertion the plane was deliberately diverted and flown for over seven hours after severing communications.

Chief investigator Kok Soo Chon said the cause of the disappearance cannot be determined until the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes are found. He said there was no evidence of abnormal behavior or stress in the two pilots that could lead them to hijack the plane but all passengers were also cleared by police and had no pilot training.

On March 8, 2014, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah radioed air traffic controllers “Good night, Malaysia,” as the Boeing 777 he was piloting left the country’s airspace. A short time later, he and the 250-foot plane disappeared.

By daybreak, Zaharie and the 238 other people on MH370 would be at the center of the biggest airplane mystery since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

Authorities may never know the answers to crucial questions about what happened after that final communication:

Why did the plane end up thousands of miles off course? Who switched the transponder off, preventing anyone from tracking the aircraft? And why was there never a mayday message or a final phone call or a desperate text from a panicked passenger?

But on Monday, authorities in Malaysia conceded that they do know one thing about the final hours of flight MH370:

Inside the plane, someone was in control.

After four years spent scouring every available detail about the final moments of the Beijing-bound flight, investigators in Malaysia determined that the plane’s disappearance wasn’t due to a mechanical or computer malfunction. Some person, the investigation concluded, was responsible for the plane veering off course — a direction change that doomed all 239 people aboard.

“The change in flight path probably resulted from manual inputs,” the government’s report said. A system malfunction alone couldn’t account for sudden shifts in the direction of the plane.

Investigators with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau have said that everybody on the plane — the captain, his co-pilot, the passengers and crew — was unconscious as the uncontrolled craft ran out of fuel and plunged into the Indian Ocean.

The Malaysian investigation now says someone controlled the craft for at least some of the time after Zaharie’s goodbye.

Still, Malaysian investigators said they have no way of determining who that person was — especially because the plane and most of its wreckage haven’t been found.

The culprit could be the pilot or the co-pilot — or “unlawful interference” from one of the other 237 people on board who managed to get into the cockpit and wrest control from the plane’s operators, Kok Soo Chon, head of the MH370 safety investigation team, said at a news conference Monday.