Malaysia jet latest: Police probe passenger, the Taliban angle, Australia enters search and where was the military?

Missing Malaysian airlines Flight MH370 could have been deliberately diverted under the radar to Taliban-controlled areas on the Afghan border.

By Dave Lancaster |

11:26 17 March 2014

An interesting clue has further fuelled speculation that missing Malaysian airlines flight MH370 was hijacked: the final message from the cockpit came after one of the plane's communications systems had been turned off.

The final message from the cockpit to air traffic controllers was "All right, good night" after the ACARS reporting system was disabled. It is believed that co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid uttered the words.

14 minutes later, the plane's transponder was switched off.

Now investigators are looking into the possibility that the Boeing 777 plane (which has been missing for over a week) was flown to a Taliban stronghold in North West Pakistan, The Independent newspaper reports.

The search effort has expanded as over 25 countries have united in their actions to find the missing passenger plane with Australia entering the search.

The search is looking into two air corridors: the northern arc from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand; the southern from Indonesia to the Indian Ocean. Australia is taking charge of the southern area.

"Today, I can confirm that search and rescue operations in the northern and southern corridors have already begun," the Malaysian Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, confirmed at a press conference on Monday.

Another angle for investigation is that of Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat, 29, a Malaysian flight engineer who happened to be a passenger on the plane. Anybody with aviation knowledge onboard is being looked into but the engineer certainly has the most of all of the passengers.

Khairul specialised in executive jets which doesn't mean that he had all of the technical knowhow to divert and fly a much larger jetliner.

Alan Diehl, a former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) crash investigator, stated that if this was indeed a hijacking, “they would have to be [helped by] somebody who has detailed knowledge of the plane.”

“Could they get down below the radar and make a beeline to an abandoned airstrip somewhere? I suppose the short answer is yes. Even today, satellites don’t cover every square kilometre of the Earth.”

The incident has also brought to light criticism of Malaysia's military who failed to immediately notice the problem as it was happening. When the flight went off course and when an unidentified object (now confirmed to be MH370) flew across the country's air space, no actions were taken.

Malaysia's acting Transport Minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, who also acts as the country's defence minister, stated: "This is an unprecedented case. It may change aviation history. I think it's lessons to be learnt for everybody."

This is the manifest for Flight MH370:
 
153 Chinese
38 Malaysians
7 Indonesians
6 Australians
5 Indians
4 French
3 Americans
2 each from New Zealand, Ukraine and Canada
One each from Russia, Taiwan, Netherlands

Two men (one of which has been confirmed as Iranian) were flying using stolen Italian and Austrian passports; however it is thought that these were only looking to emigrate.