MH370 remains a mystery, 9 years later

MH370 remains a mystery, 9 years later





WHAT happened to flight MH370?

That is one mystery that families of those on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared mysteriously nine years ago, were hoping the Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim-led government will get to the bottom of.

The fate of flight MH370 became one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries when it disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.


Speaking to Utusan Malaysia, Selamat Omar, 70, whose son Mohd Khairul Amri is among the 239 passengers on board the still-missing Boeing 777 said over the past nine years, different prime ministers had helmed the country but none could offer answers to what had happened to the ill-fated flight.

“Now that Anwar is prime minister, I hope he could unravel the mystery like how he said in 2014 that Malaysia should have the capabilities of finding out what happened to MH370,” he told the Malay daily.

“What I want to know is if there are any updates on this matter. Why did MH370 go missing? Did it crash or was it shot down? We want to know the truth because this is not something new – it has remained a mystery for nine years.”

According to Selamat, he has long accepted the disappearance of his son, a flight engineer and a passenger onboard the ill-fated flight.

“As a father, I have come to accept whatever decision made [on the matter] but I hope that we will at least get to see the bulk of the aircraft and unravel the mystery behind MH370’s disappearance,” he said.

“In the past there have been many claims about how the bulk of the aircraft had been discovered and such rumours are so confusing that we don’t know whether to believe them or not.”

In 2014, Anwar – who was the opposition leader back then – told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the country’s radar system had the ability to track an aircraft flying westwards from the peninsula right up to the Indian Ocean.

He also said he had been the finance minister when Malaysia procured the Radar Marconi system and with the system, Malaysia should have been able to detect the plane’s movement when it made the “air turnback” westwards, diverting off its original flight path to Beijing.

For context, as reported by New Straits Times in April 13, 2000, Italian firm Alenia-Marconi Systems was awarded a contract in 1994 to supply Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) with primary and secondary radars.

As at the time of the newspaper report, Malaysia had five primary and seven secondary radars installed at the Kuching, Kota Kinabalu, Johor, Subang, Langkawi, Labuan and Sepang airports.

Debris confirmed or believed to be from the MH370 aircraft has washed up along the African coast and on islands in the Indian Ocean.

Malaysian investigators previously drew no conclusion about what happened aboard the flight, but they did not rule out the possibility that the aircraft had been deliberately taken off course. – March 6, 2023