Why can’t they f ind it?
40 ships and 30 planes scour hundreds of square miles of sea... but still there’s no sign of missing Flight MH370
MYSTERY surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 deepened last night after the third day of massive search operation failed to yield any clues.
Malaysian officials admitted they were ‘baffled and perturbed’ that more than 40 ships and 34 aircraft despatched to scour hundreds of square miles of the South China Sea had failed to find any sign of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers.
The admission came shortly before a Cathay Pacific pilot reported seeing a large field of debris 50 miles off the southern coast of Vietnam, some 280 miles from flight MH370’s last known position.
Ships were dispatched to the scene to investigate but it was unclear last night whether the sighting was a false alarm.
Meanwhile theories about the plane’s fate took a bizarre turn when the head of Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Authority revealed that one of two passengers travelling on stolen passports who had been identified resembled Italian footballer Mario Balotelli, who is of Ghanaian origin.
At a press conference in Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman also dismissed earlier reports that the suspect passengers were ‘Asian looking’. He gave no further information about the background of the second passenger.
He has declined to issue pictures
‘Baffled and perturbed’
of the passengers, but revealed that he had passed on CCTV footage of t hem passing t hrough Kuala Lumpur airport to security officials in the US and China.
Last night a group called the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade claimed responsibility for the plane’s disappearance but officials believed it could be a hoax.
The shadowy outfit sent a message saying: ‘You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as payback’, in reference to the killing of a Chinese separatist who launched a bloody attack at a railway station over a week ago.
Each day of the search has raised hopes – which have subsequently been dashed to the dismay of fami l i es of the passengers who are thought to include Chinese, Australian, American and European nationals.
Oil slicks, an object thought to be an aircraft door, and another thought to be a life raft, have all been found to have no connection with the missing plane.
Last night officials were considering expanding the search to take in areas to the west of the search area, heading away from the South China Sea between Malaysia and the southern part of Vietnam and looking in the Bay of Bengal, which covers thousands of miles.
However, speculation seems to be forming a consensus that the air- craft travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing suffered a ‘catastrophic event’, preventing the captain, 53year-old Zahari Ahmad Shah, from making a Mayday call.
This includes scenarios such as the aircraft suddenly breaking up, a bomb exploding, or the flight crew being disabled i n an attack by hijackers.
Aviation experts said the l ast flight to suddenly disappear at 35,000ft was Pan Am flight 103 destroyed over Lockerbie in 1988.
One senior official involved in the huge international inquiry said the scant evidence ‘appears to indicate’ that the aircraft ‘ disintegrated at around 35,000ft’.
Asked if a bomb was responsible, he said the closest parallels were Lockerbie and Air India flight 182 which was brought down by a bomb off the coast of Cork in 1985.
Meanwhile, a senior police official told news agency Reuters that passengers armed with explosives and carrying false identity papers had tried to fly out of Kuala Lumpur in the past.
‘There have been two or three incidents,’ he said, but declined to reveal any more details.
But doubts that the two mystery passengers were terrorists began t o emerge amid cl ai ms t hat Malaysia was a hub for illegal migrants, many of whom use false documents.