Australian officials warned families of MH370 data leak from FBI

The FBI has refused to reveal a report purportedly showing MH370’s pilot tracked a similar path on a home simulator.

New York magazine cited a leaked FBI report which supported the idea of pilot suicide on flight MH370.

The FBI has refused to reveal details of a report purportedly showing that the pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 tracked a similar path on a home flight simulator to that taken by the ill-fated aircraft less than a month later, and has referred all questions to Malaysian authorities.

However a spokeswoman for families of MH370 victims has told The Australian the group was warned by Australian officials from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the Joint Action Co-ordinating Committee last week that FBI data potentially furthering the theory of pilot suicide was to be published by New York magazine last weekend.

An FBI spokeswoman told The Australian: “The FBI did not publicly release information on the flight, therefore we cannot comment on it. I refer you to the Malaysian authorities for specific questions about the case.”

She had been asked if the FBI had passed on to the Australian Federal Police or other Australian agencies the information it extracted from Malaysia Airlines captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s home flight simulator.

Grace Nathan, from next-of-kin group Voice 370, said she and other families met officials from the ATSB and JACC before and after last Friday’s meeting of Australian, Malaysian and Chinese transport ministers that agreed to soon suspend the search.

“We were already told that the article was coming out by JACC and ATSB, who were here for a meeting last Friday,” said Ms Nathan, who lost her mother on the March 2014 flight, which disappeared with 239 people aboard.

“They told us that an independent group had been given the (Zaharie simulator) data by the FBI, so most of us were not surprised when the news came out.”

The New York article cited a leaked FBI report showing Zaharie had used a simulator less than a month before the aircraft’s disappearance to practise a flight across the southern Indian Ocean closely matching MH370’s route.

Ms Nathan said: “I was told by the JACC that the information was provided by the FBI. They work closely with independent groups and said FBI provided information to independent groups who decided they wanted to publish it in New York magazine.”

New York, however, says the FBI findings from the home simulator were returned to Malaysia and someone from Malaysian Police leaked them.

The ATSB in a statement this week acknowledged the FBI data but said it showed “only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance, nor where the aircraft is landed”.

New Zealand-based physicist Duncan Steel, from the so-called Independent Group of investigators into MH370’s disappearance which argues the search has been in the wrong area, denied any of his members had received FBI data or leaked it onwards.

He told The Australian in an email exchange that the Independent Group had no input into the story, nor had it seen the leaked information. “So far as I am aware, the information was given to the writer of the story in NY magazine by a third party in absolute confidence. I am not at liberty to identify the third party (not a Malaysian, nor anybody living in Malaysia or the USA) who originally obtained the leaked information,” Mr Steel wrote.

In a later email, he said information from Captain Zaharie’s home simulator was “quite likely irrelevant and cannot be taken to be evidence of any actual intent to fly such a path” given the route positions were consistent with one terminating at an airfield in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound.

“It is easy to imagine that an experienced airline captain, bored with flying to the same old places, might like to consider more exotic destinations,” he wrote.

Ms Nathan said she too was sceptical about the theory of pilot suicide. “I keep my mind open and still think anything is possible and if there is merit to (the theory) and it is supported by evidence we need to be open to that.

“Right now it is just another conspiracy theory in a long line of them. But it still throws you for a loop. An accident is one thing but to find out it might have been a homicide or suicide is another.”