‘TOP LEVEL’ SOURCE SAID PILOT BEHIND MISSING PLANE

PERTH Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister, has claimed high-level Malaysian government officials told him the 2014 disappearance of flight MH370, carrying 239 people, was caused by a murder-suicide carried out by the pilot.

Abbott told a Sky News documentary that it was his “very clear understanding” that the “very top levels” of the Malaysian government believed from “very early on” that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately crashed the plane.

“I’m not going to say who said what to whom, but let me reiterate ... it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot,” said Abbott.

Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An independent investigation concluded in 2018 that the plane’s course was changed manually and suggested “intervention by a third party.”