MH370 pilot Zaharie ‘was planning to retire to Australia’

The pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 planned to retire to Australia with his wife, say relatives.

The pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 planned to retire to Australia with his wife and had given his adult daughter money to invest in property there, relatives have told The Australian.

Asuad Khan Mustafa, brother-in-law of MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, said: “He (Zaharie) wanted to migrate to Australia. He even asked his daughter to buy a house there and gave her money to do it. The moment he dis­appeared, that plan ended. He wanted the daughter to work in Australia and they (wife Faizah and Zaharie) would go there.”

The Australian has been told by another close relative of Captain Zaharie that the couple had hoped to settle in Geelong after his planned retirement at 60, where their daughter Aishah had been working as an architect.

In the months leading to the March 8, 2014, disappearance of Flight MH370 and all 239 people on board, Captain Zaharie is understood to have grown close to a former kindergarten teacher and her three young children, including one with severe ­cerebral palsy.

Fatima Pardi told The Australian her last conversation with Captain Zaharie had been by text message two days before the flight, though it was of a personal nature she was unwilling to reveal. She said the two were just friends but Captain Zaharie had loved her children and told her he wanted a close relationship with them because his own kids had grown up and he spent a lot of time alone.

Ms Pardi said they had met as political volunteers for Malaysia’s opposition People’s Justice Party (PKR) on election day in May 2013 and developed a close bond through a shared desire to bring change to a political system riddled with systemic corruption.

Though Malaysian investi­gators’ March 2015 interim report into MH370 cleared Captain Zaharie, co-pilot Fariq Hamid and cabin crew of suspicion, a second interim statement released last March said it would review all flight crew profiles.

Australia’s MH370 search and rescue efforts have been criticised for effectively ruling out the possibility of a controlled landing in their search parameters.

One theory posed by those who say the most likely explanation for the plane’s disappearance was human intervention is that Captain Zaharie hijacked the plane as a political protest against the imminent jailing of PKR leader Anwar Ibrahim, who lost an ­appeal against a sodomy charge hours before the red-eye flight.

While Captain Zaharie was distantly related, through marriage, to Anwar Ibrahim, his family have strenuously dismissed this theory.

Peter Chong, who also befriended Captain Zaharie through the PKR, told The Australian the veteran pilot was one of thousands who volunteered in the lead-up to the 2013 campaign and would spend eight or nine hours a day helping when not rostered to fly.

Mr Chong said Captain Zaharie was “angry at corruption, and how the courts were being abused” to push politically motivated sodomy charges against the now-jailed opposition leader Anwar, but he was neither a political nor religious ­extremist.

Nor was he in court late on March 7, 2014 — as some have speculated — when Anwar lost his appeal. By early 2014, he had begun to withdraw from the political scene, Mr Chong said.

Around the same time, Ms Pardi says their friendship cooled, at Captain Zaharie’s instigation, because of a “personal matter”.

As the MH370 search prepares to wind down, Malaysia’s National Union of Flight Attendants has again queried why a second transponder located in the cabin crew closet outside the cockpit was not triggered — or its signal picked up — after Captain Zaharie signed off from Malaysian air space and the cockpit transponder stopped transmitting.