MH370 captain was ‘obsessed’ with models and Malaysian leadership before doomed flight crashed
EXPLOSIVE new details have emerged about the MH370 captain’s political beliefs and his obsession with young models, suggesting he was not mentally fit to fly a plane.
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EXCLUSIVE: The prime suspect in the murder of 238 plane passengers and crew has been revealed as a creepy and manic man who obsessed over younger women on social media and was furious at his country’s political direction.
The revelations shed startling new light on the mental health and competence of Malaysia Airlines Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot-in-command when MH370 flew to its doom on March 8, 2014.
Aviation experts and psychologists say Zaharie exhibited self-destructive and obsessive online behaviour that should have raised a red flag with Malaysia Airlines.
In the 12 months prior to the Boeing 777’s disappearance, Zaharie haunted the Facebook pages of Malaysian twin sister models who were more than 30 years younger than him, sending messages heavy in sexual innuendo.
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The senior pilot, who programmed and then deleted a journey-of-no-return to the southern Indian Ocean on his home flight simulator, was also in despair for democracy in his country and in constant back pain.
Without concealing his identity, the married pilot, at the age of 53, openly chased much younger women on social media and risked his career by putting his name to rants against the ruling government, which owned the airline for which he flew.
Though described by acquaintances as “kind” and “easy going”, Zaharie appeared to have had hit a midlife roadblock and had become bored and reckless.
Across 2013, he posted 97 separate Facebook comments to the page of Penang-based model Qi Min Lan, also known as Jasmin Min, who turned 18 that year. Zaharie did not know her personally, but was fixated.
“HI PRINCESS,” wrote Zaharie, who was based in Kuala Lumpur where he lived with his wife. “When in KL,” he asked in another. “How about KL?” he persisted. He got no response from the model.
Further messages to Qi Min read: “Chomel u!” which means, “You’re cute”; “Cun cun,” meaning, “Beautiful”; “Comei”, also meaning “Cute”; and “Sui Lo,” Chinese slang for “Damn it” — as in, “Damn it, you’re hot.”
In another, where the model posts a photo of herself in a bathrobe saying she is going to get changed, he messaged: “Just shower?”
Zaharie posted fewer messages to Qi Min’s twin, Lan Qi Hui, but all carried the tone of a desperate older man. Qi Min did not respond to questions about Zaharie but Qi Hui wrote in an email: “Hi I duno him at all ya. Sry.”
The posts reveal a previously uncharted dimension of the pilot’s intense character, as do a deeper look at his political activities.
Zaharie was not merely politically active, as some have said. He was vociferous, at one point labelling then prime minister Najib Razak a “moron” on his Facebook page.
In the month of April 2013, in the lead up to Malaysian national elections, Zaharie posted 119 comments under his own name, all reflecting his disgust with Najib’s government as he urged citizens to action.
In May, after Najib’s Barisan Nasional party won another five-year term, Zaharie seemed to despair. “There is a rebel is each and every one of us. Let it out! Don’t waste your life on mundane lifestyle. When is it enough?” he posted on May 23.
Though Najib — who lost power in May this year — was a deeply unpopular prime minister in a country where individuals faced arrest or censure for expressing opinions, Zaharie had gone beyond such concerns.
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of airlineratings.com, said it was extraordinary for a senior pilot to make political comment at all, especially working for a government-owned airline.
“It should have raised serious alarm bells with the airline that you have someone flying who has such strong anti-government views,” said Mr Thomas.
“If a Qantas pilot did something like that, he would be spoken to and grounded. To post 119 anti-government comments (in a month), including calling the prime minister a moron, that should have raised serious concerns about the captain’s stability.”
UK-based psychologist Paul Dickens, whose Core Aviation Psychology is a world leader in assessing the mental health of commercial pilots, said Zaharie’s social media use indicated he was obsessive.
“I’d be speaking to the airline operator to raise a red flag over this person, to say I think he needs very careful monitoring,” said Mr Dickens, who has assessed hundreds of pilots.
“I think what you’re seeing is a degree of obsessional behaviour mixed with recklessness, which is unusual for a pilot. He had a degree of obsessional behaviour about the politics and the girl.”
“Commercial pilots are highly risk-averse, and for someone to be doing both those things would ring definite alarm bells with me.”
Melbourne-based clinical psychologist Vasileios Stravopoulos, who specialises in problem online behaviour, said Zaharie appeared to deliberately invite negative consequences and exhibited signs of “diffusion” — meaning reduced control of his online persona leading to compromised real-life performance.
Observed Dr Stravopoulos: “I’m 53, publicly making comments about a model on Facebook, where my wife, my relatives, friends or children can observe my activities, doesn’t that indicate an indirect form of self-destructiveness? Wasn’t he inviting a family crisis?”
“His political outbursts are another example of diffusion. If you have a corrupted government in Malaysia and you publicly make comment, don’t you expect to invite some form of direct or indirect cost?
“He acted self-destructively. When you put these things together and you see the bigger picture, it seems something was happening.”
The Malaysian government’s so-called final report on MH370, released in July and widely described as a whitewash, did not mention Zaharie’s politics nor his Facebook activities relating to the young women.
Professor Mark Wiggins, a psychologist who has advised the US Federal Aviation Administration, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, was reluctant to comment on Zaharie’s mental state but said his online activities should have been an important line of inquiry.
“There’s no question there,” said Professor Wiggins. “In this case, every single line of inquiry should have been exhausted. Absolutely. We don’t know what’s important so we must investigate everything.
“This was investigated like an aircraft accident but I don’t think it can be. It needs to be investigated like a murder inquiry.”
Malaysia Airlines did not respond to questions as to whether it had asked Zaharie to desist in his political postings, or the professionalism it demanded of pilots using social media.
A leaked 2014 Royal Malaysian Police report also considered Zaharie’s health, stating: “His spinal condition is a quite chronic physical problem and it is not a new stressor.” It described him as having “diseases of the spine, which caused him to have to take treatment drugs, (namely) painkiller analgesics.”
This referred to ongoing issues from 2007, where medical records from that time show Zaharie fell from a ladder and fractured a lumbar vertebra, requiring spinal fusion surgery.
The 2018 Malaysian report, however, said he’d had a paragliding accident, not a ladder fall, and reached the reverse conclusion to the police report: “Based on available information, he was not on any regular long-term medication for any chronic medical illness.”
It said examination of Zaharie’s credit card transactions did not reveal that he was buying over-the-counter medication, but intriguingly noted: “The possibility that such medication may have been purchased by cash cannot be excluded.”
The contradictions between the earlier police report and the official report raise the possibility that Zaharie concealed a potentially career-ending health problem from his employer.
On May 7, 2014, hours before MH370 made a sharp unscheduled turn south and went missing shortly after takeoff for Beijing, Zaharie’s hero and distant relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to five years in prison after his previous acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned.
It is now accepted that Zaharie did not attend the trial that day, but Ibrahim’s unjust second jailing — prosecuted by Najib’s government — must have rankled the activist pilot.
It has been established by the FBI and the Australian Safety Transport Bureau that Zaharie had six weeks earlier programmed a flight to the southern Indian Ocean on his home simulator and then deleted the information, though it was uncovered on a shadow file.
One of the waypoints he programmed took MH370 directly to the area where the searches for the wreckage concentrated, yet the Malaysian report concluded “there were no unusual activities other than game-related flight simulations”.
The ATSB thought otherwise, diplomatically stating in its final report of 2016 that Zaharie’s simulations bore “enough similarities to the flight path of MH370 for the ATSB to carefully consider the possible implications for the underwater search area”.
The combination of Zaharie’s deep frustration with his government, a sense his machismo was failing, his use of medication, and fixated social media usage that indicated he had too much time on his hands and had lost his sense of self-awareness, may have been enough to tip him over.
Together, these events could be viewed as equal or greater motive to the 2015 Germanwings crash authored by the suicidal co-pilot, or the 1997 Silk Air crash, thought caused by a pilot in financial strife.
MH370 pushed back from the gate at 12:27am on May 8 and was airborne at 12:42am, Malaysian time. At 01:19am, the pilot spoke his last known words, signing off from the Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control Centre: “Good night Malaysia Three Seven Zero.”
Around this time, the aircraft — with six Australians among its 239 passengers and crew — made its sudden about turn. At 1:52am, or 33 minutes later, the plane was over Penang, Zaharie’s home town, where a local telco tower detected a “hit” from a cellphone registered to co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.
The information about this single hit is limited. It is not known whether Fariq tried to make a call or send an SMS. The only thing that has been confirmed for certain about this is that Fariq’s phone was on at the time.
People who have flown on Asian carriers would agree that a good number of passengers never turn off their phones. Therefore: why did the tower not pick up hits from other passengers who had their phones on?
It is yet another line of investigation the Malaysian report infuriatingly failed to explore, but raises the question whether Fariq and passengers — assuming they were still alive — tried to raise the alarm or say farewell to their loved ones.
CAN AUSTRALIA PUSH MALAYSIA TO COME CLEAN ON MH370?
Countries with passengers on MH370 could sanction Malaysia to force it to come clean on what it knows about the plane’s disappearance.
The obvious collective sanction would be to block Malaysia Airlines, owned by the Malaysian government, from operating in its airspace.
With Malaysia refusing to admit the overwhelming evidence against Captain Zaharie Shah, this appears to be the only way families of loved ones aboard the missing airliner can move towards acceptance.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN agency which oversees the Convention on International Civil Aviation (to which Malaysia is signatory), said it could not order an investigation.
It told News Corp that “a group of countries, and not ICAO itself, would need to come together” to “try and compel any other signatory country” to fulfil its international responsibilities.
This means those with passengers on MH370 — China, Indonesia, Australia, India, France, USA, Ukraine, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Russia and Taiwan — could unite to force Malaysia’s hand.
Malaysia, which has the legal responsibility to investigate MH370, was required by convention to produce July’s “accident report” — seen far and wide as a sham.
France, unsatisfied with the report, has begun its own investigation, re-examining the satellite shakes and the flaperon that was found on Réunion Island, which is French territory.
But whatever it finds will only matter if Malaysia listens.
Sanctions, however, would cripple and humiliate Malaysia’s national carrier, but it need not go far. The threat might be enough to force their hand.
News Corp attempted to contact all families of the Australian passengers aboard MH370. Relatives of Cathy and Bob Lawton declined to comment.
Originally published as MH370 captain was ‘obsessed’ with models and Malaysian leadership before doomed flight crashed
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