MH370 co-pilot may have tried to make mid-flight call

LONDON — The co-pilot of the missing Malaysian airliner MH370 tried to make a mid-flight call from his mobile phone just before the plane vanished from radar screens, according to Malaysian newspaper reports.

The call ended abruptly possibly “because the aircraft was fast moving away from the [telecommunications] tower,” the New Straits Times quoted a source as saying.

However, the Malaysian daily also quoted another source saying that while Fariq Abdul Hamid’s “line was reattached”, there was no certainty that a call was made from the Boeing 777 which vanished on 8 March.

The report — titled a “desperate call for help” — did not say who the co-pilot was trying to contact.

Fariq and Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah have come under intense scrutiny after the plane mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Investigators indicated last month that the flight was deliberately diverted and its communication systems manually switched off as it was leaving Malaysian airspace, triggering a criminal investigation by police that has revealed little of substance so far.

A number of theories have been put forward concerning the fate of MH370, including a hijacking, a terrorist attack or a rogue pilot.

There have been unconfirmed reports in the Malaysian media of calls made by the captain before or during the flight but so far no details have been released.

The NST report said that after turning off course MH370 flew low enough near Penang island on Malaysia’s west coast for a telecom tower to pick up the co-pilot’s phone signal.

The phone line was “reattached” between the time the plane veered off course and blipped off the radar, the government-controlled paper quoted the second source as saying.

“A ‘reattachment’ does not necessarily mean that a call was made. It can also be the result of the phone being switched on again.”

Malaysia’s transport ministry said it was examining the NST report and would issue a response.

However, Mr Hishammuddin Hussein, the transport minister, appeared to quash the claim. “I cannot comment [on the newspaper report] because if it is true, we would have known about it much earlier,” he told reporters.

“We received numerous leads and we followed them but unfortunately, it was a roller-coaster ride, whereby we received information and investigated [them] but they were baseless.”

He said that throughout the search for the aircraft, he had not confirmed anything without corroboration or verification. THE GUARDIAN