Door ‘still open’ on new hunt for MH370, says Malaysia’s Anwar

Malaysia’s PM-in-waiting says new information from a domestic investigation could solve the world’s biggest aviation mystery.

‘We need to look at (search) failures,’ says prime minister-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim. Picture: AP

Malaysia’s prime minister-in-waiting, Anwar Ibrahim, has left open the door to a new search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 pending a complete ­investigation into a series of domestic failures that occurred on the night it went missing and in the weeks afterwards.

Mr Anwar told The Weekend Australian he would ensure his new government conducted a full review of internal documents related to Malaysian radar information on the missing plane’s movements, the failure of three separate monitoring systems — air traffic control, the air force and Malaysia Airlines — to quickly raise the alarm, and discrepancies in MH370’s cargo manifests.

“This is local information in which we can do further digging. Then perhaps we can reopen communications with the international bodies with our new information,” he said yesterday. “The radar could speak volumes. Was it a failure of the system? Was it a failure of those monitoring the system or was it an intention to ignore or cover up? To me, that is still to be ­determined.

“I am not ruling out further searches in the future depending on what these domestic investigations bring up.”

His comments come after Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook intimated that the current “no find, no fee” search by ocean survey company Ocean Infinity could be the final one for the plane, which went missing on March 8, 2014, 38 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

An earlier $200 million search of a 120,000sq km area of southern Indian Ocean — jointly funded by Australia, Malaysia and China — ended in January last year. The plane’s disappearance remains the world’s biggest aviation mystery.

Mr Loke told The Weekend Australian the new government had agreed to extend Ocean Infinity’s search to May 29 and would “decide later” on any further action. But, he added, “there would be no withholding of information” and a final report would be made public within three months.

In an open letter to Malaysia’s Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) government, which won the election this month, relatives of MH370 passengers urged the new administration to be more transparent than its predecessor and release all relevant ­documents, such as the full cargo manifest. For several weeks after MH370 disappeared, Malaysian authorities refused to hand over the plane’s cargo manifest, fuelling theories the plane may have been taken over remotely to prevent sensitive cargo reaching ­Beijing. When they finally did, there were disparities relating to ­2.2 tonnes of cargo initially ­described as lithium batteries and then as “radio accessories and chargers”.

Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian strongman who was sworn in as the country’s seventh Prime Minister this month, told The Australian in March that he believed the remote takeover theory was plausible.

Voice 370 has also called for a probe into possible tampering of MH370 records, or an “act of ­omission that may have impaired tracking, search, rescue and recovery”.

Mr Anwar said he believed there were “a lot of questionable decisions made, discrepancies in cargo and passenger lists”, as well as in the government’s initial ­assertion that the plane flew over the South China Sea. It changed its version only after Thai authorities revealed radar information showing MH370 flew over mainland Malaysia before heading ­towards the Indian Ocean. “They (the former government) have to explain why they had a different version. Clearly we need to look at such failures before we can have final closure,” he said. “I intend to call the Transport Minister … and ensure these things are being done. I believe the radar in the northeast can tell us more than what was clear then.

“The cargo was also important because what was described by authorities and what was in the cargo was totally different. We went through the list — which ­included mangosteens and technical equipment — but that equipment did not tally (when cross-referenced with the Penang factory that shipped it).”

Mr Anwar has given little credence to the theory the plane was hijacked by pilot Zaharie Shah, a member of his People’s Justice Party (PKR) that is one of four parties in the governing coalition. Although the two were distantly related by marriage — a daughter of one of Captain Zaharie’s cousins is married to Mr Anwar’s son — and had met a few times, they did not know each other.

Zaharie and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid were initially named by Malaysian authorities as suspects in the aircraft’s dis­appearance, and conspiracy theories quickly followed. One had the 53-year-old ditching the plane in despair at the end of his marriage, or at the end of a love affair with a married woman. Another suggested he was so enraged at Mr Anwar’s politically motivated second conviction for sodomy, given hours before MH370 was due to take off, that he hijacked his own plane to destabilise the government of Najib Razak.

Sivarasa Rasiah, Mr Anwar’s lawyer and a PKR MP who ­befriended Zaharie after he joined the party, told The Weekend Australian the pilot was not in court the evening Mr Anwar was convicted on a second trumped-up sodomy charge because his MH370 flight was scheduled to take off four hours later.

Mr Sivarasa does not believe the pilot murder-suicide theory and said it was a smokescreen for systemic failures in the hours and weeks after plane’s disappeared.

“The basic issue is two independent Malaysian agencies, air traffic control and the air force, failed that night. If you include MAS, then that’s three. How do you explain this? Where is the ­inquiry into this? If a military jet had been scrambled (at the first sign of the plane changing course), we would not be having this conversation. That’s why it’s so easy to believe there is much more to this than meets the eye.”