Terror group Chinese Martyrs Brigade claims missing flight was ‘payback’, officials label it hoax

NO ONE has heard of them but this shadowy group sent a threatening email which said: “You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as pay back.”

A SHADOWY group called the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade claimed responsibility for the disappearance of Flight MH370 — but officials were sceptical and said the claim could be a hoax.

The group — unheard of before now — on Sunday sent an email to journalists across China that read: “You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as pay back,” but the message provided no details of what brought the flight down.

Malaysian Defense Minister Hishamuddin Hussein told reporters he doubted the claim’s legitimacy.

“There is no sound or credible grounds to justify their claims,” he said, according to Malaysian news reports.

Other officials said the claim could be a hoax aimed at increasing ethnic tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the wake of the March 1 knife attacks in the south-western city of Kunming that left 29 people dead and about 140 others injured.

The message was delivered through an encrypted, anonymous Hushmail service that is virtually impossible to trace, they said.

GHOST FLIGHTS: THE PLANES THAT DISAPPEARED

No lead: Officials said the oil slicks discovered by Vietnamese search aircraft were not aircraft fuel. Picture: AFP

Investigators also said Monday that debris spotted from the air that was originally believed to be from the plane turned out to be a large cable spool unconnected to the aircraft.

They also said an oil slick discovered in the region was not connected to the flight.

Investigators suspect the vanished Malaysian airliner may have been blown out of the sky — just like the jumbo jet that rained deadly wreckage onto Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

A senior official involved in the probe of its disappearance said the evidence so far “appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet,” Reuters reported.

Asked if that suggested a bomb blew up the Boeing 777, the source said there was no evidence yet of foul play, but noted the closest parallels to the plane’s disappearance early Saturday over the South China Sea were the 1980s bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie and Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland.

Although the source added that the flight, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, could have broken apart due to mechanical failure, Malaysian officials have not ruled out a hijacking.

Chinese officials arrive in Malaysia to aid the search. Picture: Getty Images

Meanwhile, Hussein said authorities have surveillance video of the two passengers who boarded the plane using stolen passports.

Rahman, the civil aviation chief, said officials had reviewed surveillance tape of the plane’s boarding and are now saying the pair were not Asian, as they had originally indicated.

“We confirmed now they are not Asian-looking males,” Rahman said, adding that one of the men was black.

One had been identified, officials said, though they refused to release a name or nationality.

Malaysian Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said the other passenger also appeared to be Asian, and blasted the border officials who let them through while carrying passports from Austria and Italy.

“Can’t these immigration officials think? Italian and Austrian [passport holders] but with Asian faces,” Hamidi fumed.

Five booked passengers failed to show up for the flight, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Other troubling details emerged when a telephone operator on a China-based hotline for KLM airlines confirmed Sunday that the passengers travelling with the stolen passports had booked one-way tickets on the same KLM flight from Beijing to Amsterdam on Saturday.

Read more of this story at The New York Post