The case against MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah
IT’S the only true conspiracy theory still standing as the search for MH370 continues, and it’s the one Malaysia is choosing to ignore.
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MALAYSIA will never satisfy the longing for answers of relatives of those lost on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 by acknowledging the compelling evidence that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned and executed a flight of no return into the southern Indian Ocean.
Aviation experts across the world see it as self-evident that Zaharie deliberately flew 227 passengers and 11 crew to their deaths on March 8, 2014.
Even Malcolm Turnbull conceded it was “very likely that the captain planned this shocking event”.
But the Malaysian Government, which wholly owns Malaysia Airlines, remains in denial and in doing saves face, and an airline. The only true conspiracy theory still standing into MH370 is why Malaysia ignores the obvious point of inquiry: Captain Zaharie.
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As Texan hydrographic survey company Ocean Infinity has one final roll of the dice in seas off WA, towing up to eight underwater vehicles in its “last push” to find the airliner, it is not looking positive.
The just-deposed government of Malaysia negotiated a no-find, no-fee deal with Ocean Infinity, giving it 90 days to find the wreckage. If it does not succeed, by May’s end, the hunt will be called off forever — even though scientific consensus is that the searchers are in the right area.
It will be devastating for the families.
MH370 ‘A CRIMINAL ESCAPADE’
Lawyer John Dawson, who represented nine families from MH370 and MH17, shot down over the Ukraine two months after MH370’s disappearance, agrees Malaysia will never call out Zaharie.
“He was off on his own frolic, it was a criminal escapade,” says Dawson.
“The company will be partly absolved because there’s a very broad rule an employer can’t be wholly responsible for a criminal act by an employee. But the reputational damage is terrible.”
Brand damage destroyed Pan-Am after the Tenerife disaster of 1977 and then Lockerbie in 1988.
Pan-Am was a private company; but for many governments, like Malaysia, flagship carriers sell their nation to the world.
If extracting sincerity from Najib Razak’s corrupt government was hard, it won’t improve now he’s been replaced by Mahathir Mohamad — given Zaharie was reputedly a supporter of Anwar Ibrahim, who will become Mahathir’s deputy once he is released from prison on sodomy charges.
If Zaharie committed an act of political terror to damage Najib, the new government would hardly celebrate any association with him (and Mahathir is already on the record saying he thinks MH370 was flown to its doom by remote control).
Malaysia Airlines is reinsured by a European consortium for up to $2bn. The reinsurers — required by international convention to make initial payments to passengers’ families — are in stalemated arbitration, because without a wreck the official cause, and therefore the fault, is unknown.
If MH370 is not found in the coming weeks, Malaysia could end all this by admitting the case against Zaharie. But given it is in the process of a full restructure of the airline, while retaining its existing logo, it is unlikely to do so.
“MH17 was a criminal act,” says Dawson.
“One issue is whether the aircraft should have been (over airspace in a conflict zone) in the first place, but there’s no doubt someone on the ground launched a missile. That’s bad enough.
“In MH370, you have the pilot flying between Malaysia and Beijing who turns back the aircraft. The evidence is so heavily weighted to involvement by one of the aircrew taking this aircraft down.
“That aircraft has probably depressurised, the people died of asphyxiation, it was premeditated murder. It was highly planned. The bodies have never been found.
“In MH17, it was almost instantaneous. Here, the clients are asking: ‘Would they have suffered?’ People want to know their family members didn’t suffer, that something positive comes out of it, and they want to know the truth.”
Malaysia has satisfied none of these wishes.
“Malaysia denies Zaharie had any involvement,” says Dawson.
“Yet the Malaysian police report goes into enormous detail about his simulator, and a track flown that was parallel to actual track taken by MH370. And they conclude he had nothing to do with it. It’s incomprehensible.”
THE POLITICS OF MH370
It was July 25, 2016 that Turnbull made his unexpected comments on Zaharie’s involvement. The events that led to this are significant. It was the first time Australia had pointed the finger. It also revealed Australia knew more than it was letting on; and showed the Prime Minister’s frustration with Malaysia.
A US-based journalist, Jeff Wise, had days earlier published information in New York magazine from Zaharie’s personal flight simulator, which claimed to show he’d “conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean”.
Up to that point there were rumours the FBI — which Malaysia, early on, had called in to assist — had obtained incriminating details from Zaharie’s simulator.
A French journalist based in Hong Kong, Florence de Changy, had been given documents from French sources involved in the MH370 investigation that were explosive: secret Royal Malaysian Police reports that showed Zaharie had programmed waypoints into his simulator for a flight towards Antarctica, and then deleted them.
As Wise explained to News Corp, de Changy was about to publish a book that argued the plane had flown on northwest, not south. The information did not suit her thesis.
She passed it to Victor Iannello for analysis. Iannello is part of a group of scientists, physicists and engineers who formed “The MH370 Independent Group” and were closely in touch with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which had created the Joint Agency Coordination Centre to lead the sea search for MH370.
Iannello thought the information highly significant and passed it to Wise, which was curious. Wise was, and still is, of the belief that MH370 had been flown to Kazakhstan. But Iannello guessed Wise, as a journalist would find the story irresistible — and, perhaps, would stop writing about Kazakhstan.
Wise duly published the New York story, though withheld firm conclusions about Zaharie.
Enlivened by the Wise story, on the morning of July 25, ex-RAAF, Boeing 777 pilot and media commentator Byron Bailey wrote in The Australian that “FBI data from the MH370 captain’s home computer shows he plotted a course into the southern Indian Ocean and that it was a deliberate planned murder/suicide.”
However, Bailey had not seen the FBI data and was only “told this”. There was confusion. There appeared to be Malaysian police data, and FBI data. Which was which? Did the FBI even have data?
It was an important question, because anything coming out of Malaysia had zero credibility.
It’s clear what happened: the FBI had extracted the data from Zaharie’s simulator and duly gave it back to Malaysia. The FBI also made sure the data simultaneously reached the ATSB, so it could run its own interpretation. But neither ever admitted they had the data.
The ATSB, irate at Bailey’s “murder/suicide” story, published a “Correcting the Record” statement on July 25 slamming his claims. It stated: “The FBI data (only) provides a piece of information…”
In doing so, the ATSB confirmed for the first time that a credible source — the FBI — had found data on Zaharie’s simulator. This was a major turning point.
The same day, Transport Minister Darren Chester issued a statement saying the simulator data only suggested “the possibility of planning” by the captain. But Turnbull went hard in a classic good cop, bad cop play, saying it was “very likely” the captain was responsible.
Australia was now on the way to spending $63 million on the search.
The leak of Malaysian police documents to de Changy, and Turnbull’s comments, showed the Australians and the French were trying to alter Malaysia’s narrative of denial.
British 777 pilot Simon Hardy told the BBC that Zaharie’s sharp turn took MH370 from the South China Sea, back along the border of Thailand and Malaysia, possibly as a way to enter a confusing radar zone.
The jet then hung over Penang, Zaharie’s home town, for a “last look” before heading up the Malacca Straits then banking left towards the Southern Ocean.
In late 2016, the Malaysian police reports were leaked in full.
In them, Malaysia dismissed any suggestion of Zaharie’s involvement, even though the pilot had deleted a file named “777twintower”, which showed Zaharie simulating a flight towards Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest pair of buildings in the world.
It concluded Zaharie’s simulator activities were not “outside the common” and there was “no information which directly indicates there (are) any plans to eliminate MH370”.
It would not be until October 2017, three and a half years after the plane went missing, when the ATSB published its “final report” on MH370, that Zaharie’s deleted simulator files were officially revealed.
The ATSB had known it almost from the start, yet did not share this with the public. It can be guessed that as the ATSB was trying to work with Malaysia, it thought the information too delicate to reveal.
WHAT MH370 CAPTAIN’S DATA REVEALED
The data showed Zaharie had, on February 2, five weeks before MH370’s disappearance, conducted a simulated Boeing 777 flight that made a sudden turn over the South China Sea that took the flight back, deep into the southern Indian Ocean.
The following day, Zaharie simulated a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah (a flight he was due to make the next day) that involved a similar expedition into the southern Indian Ocean.
The simulations, which Zaharie carefully deleted but were found on a shadow back-up, showed he was planning to take passengers, whether on MH370 to Beijing or MH150 to Jeddah, to their doom.
Every conspiracy about the Russians, the Chinese, the world government, the Rothschild family and the accidental American shoot-down unravelled. The two plotted courses south were too much coincidence. The captain was a killer.
The Australian Federation of Airline Pilots, which never normally comments until a crash investigation is complete, told News Corp: “Professional pilots typically use flight simulator software to maintain approach currency, or to perhaps explore news destinations and runway environment. Using it to plan a flight to nowhere is not typical use.”
The ATSB made no comment on Zaharie’s involvement in its final report, because it was “the responsibility of the Government of Malaysia, as the state of registration of the aircraft, to establish why MH370 disappeared…”
Yet the report stated: “There were enough similarities to the flight path of MH370 for the ATSB to carefully consider the possible implications for the underwater search area.”
In other words, they viewed the information on Zaharie’s simulator as so significant it was directly informing them on where to direct search priorities.
The ATSB has slammed commentators for blaming Zaharie, saying it hurts the families. But as John Dawson says, the families want the truth. Any explanation is painful.
* Neither the JACC-ATSB nor the Malaysian government would respond to questions from News Corp Australia.