Terror attack clue as 239 die in jet plunge
No mayday call as Malaysian plane ‘vanishes’ Oil slicks are found by ocean search teams Two passengers on flight had used ‘stolen passports’
FEARS were growing last night that a passenger jet which vanished from the sky with 239 people on board was the target of a terrorist attack.
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200 was brought down by a ‘sudden, catastrophic event’ with no time for a Mayday call, a senior aviation source in Kuala Lumpur told The Mail on Sunday.
Two of the passengers appeared to be travelling on stolen passports.
There were suspicions that yesterday’s incident marked a new escalation in the terror campaign by separatist Muslim Uighurs, who want their region of Xinjiang in western China to have greater autonomy from the Chinese government.
The majority of passengers on the flight from Malaysia to China were Chinese, with 13 other nationalities represented.
The plane vanished from radar screens off the coast of southern Vietnam early yesterday, sparking a huge air and sea search.
Two large oil slicks were reportedly seen in the South China Sea late yesterday near the spot where flight MH370 is believed to have plunged into the water two hours into its journey from the Malaysian capital. The search was due to resume at first light today.
Speaking in Kuala Lumpur, a senior civil aviation source told The Mail on Sunday it was ‘incomprehensible’ that the plane, which has an outstanding safety record, would have disappeared without warning.
‘Even if both engines failed, there would have been time for a Mayday call,’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘There was obviously a sudden, catastrophic event that brought this plane out of the sky. There could have been an explosion and we can’t rule out sabotage or an act of terrorism.
‘That the pilots were unable to send a distress signal lends credence to this theory.
‘If it were an engine failure, bad weather or air turbulence, the pilots would have had time to put out an emergency call. That didn’t happen.
‘That’s why the possibility of an explosive or hijacker on MH370 cannot be discounted.’
A second civil aviation source confirmed the belief that terrorism or sabotage was thought to be behind the disaster and said members of the plane’s maintenance crew were having their backgrounds examined.
International experts added further weight to the terrorism theory. In the UK, David Learmount, operations and safety editor at aviation website Flightglobal, said it was ‘extraordinary’ that the pilots did not make a distress call.
They would have had ‘plenty of time’ to report any technical problems, Mr Learmount said, adding: ‘Something happened and the pilots did not tell anyone. Why?’
Boeing 777s are regarded as among the world’s safest aircraft with only one fatal passenger accident – a crash-landing which killed three people in San Francisco last year – in nearly 20 years of service.
Fears that a terror attack caused the disaster were heightened when a list of passengers released by Beijing police reportedly had two names pixellated out, leading to online speculation they might have been ethnic Uighurs. Later, it emerged that two passengers were travelling on stolen passports belonging to nationals from Austria and Italy.
Asked whether terrorism was suspected, Malaysian transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said authorities had ‘no information, but we are looking at all possibilities’.
Uighurs have been behind increasingly brazen attacks on China including a car bomb atrocity in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square last October that killed five people and injured dozens more. A mass stabbing at a railway station in the southern Chinese town of Kunming on March 1 that left 28 people dead and 113 injured is also believed to have been linked to unrest in Xinjiang.