Pilot’s cousin was mystery MH370 caller

The identity of the mystery caller who made phone contact with the pilot of MH370 before it disappeared has been revealed.

Facebook photo from the profile of former Malaysia Airlines engineer Zulhaimi Bin Wahidin, the cousin of MH370 pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

A relative of the pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 says he is the aircraft engineer who made a “mysterious” 45-minute phone call to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah before the flight vanished.

Speaking for the first time, former Malaysia Airlines engineer Zulhaimi Bin Wahidin ridiculed conspiracy theories that he had provided Zaharie with technical details to enable him to ­hijack his own aircraft.

In an exclusive interview, Mr Zulhaimi told The Australian he was Zaharie’s first cousin, had been close to him all of his life, and insisted the experienced airline captain was not the sort of man who would take himself and 238 passengers and crew to their deaths.

Mr Zulhaimi last called Zaharie on February 2, 2014 — just weeks before MH370 vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Royal Malaysian Police interviewed Mr Zulhaimi “three or four” times at his home and police headquarters following the plane’s disappearance on March 8, 2014, because of their suspicion he had provided his cousin with the technical advice to hijack the Boeing 777.

“I was at police headquarters for three days. It spanned from morning to evening,” Mr Zulhaimi said. “I told them that Zaharie is a smart guy. He doesn’t need me to get all of the information.”

The route map of MH370.

Mr Zulhaimi noted that ­Zaharie was a highly experienced aviator who held licences to train and test other pilots.

“So he knew a lot about the aircraft.”

MH370 disappeared from air traffic control screens about 40 minutes into the flight when its secondary radar transponder was turned off, and just after Zaharie issued the last radio transmission, saying “Good night, Malaysian Three-Seven-Zero”.

Military primary radar and automatic satellite “handshakes” later showed MH370 flew back over Malaysia, then up the Straits of Malacca, before turning on a long track south to the southern Indian Ocean, where it remains lost despite two major undersea hunts.

Mr Zulhaimi, who now works for a different airline, feels “uneasy” about his cousin’s “name being tarnished”.

“They’re trying to blame him for what happened and it’s very hard for me to swallow that because he’s not that kind of a person,” he said.

“He was a jovial person. He had a lot of money. He was enjoying his life. Why would he kill himself for no reason? He had a good family and a good life. Successful children. I don’t think people are crazy (enough) to kill themself for nothing.

“Of course (he is innocent).”

While most staff at Malaysia Airlines knew the men were related, police initially did not.

“I asked them to get all of the information from the telco company to see how many times he has been calling me,” Mr Zul­haimi said. “When they found that he had been calling me so many times for the last 10 years then they did not question me anymore. They knew it was a genuine relationship.”

The father of three said Zaharie was actually “like a brother”.

“He’s my father’s younger brother’s son,” he said. “We share the same grandfather.

“So that was the reason why (we had that phone call). Nothing more than that.”

As boys, they both attended Penang Free School.

“Even though he’s older than me, we went to the same school together,” he said. “We used to play together (as children).

“When he joined Malaysia Airlines, after a few years I joined as well, so we were very close.”

Their phone call has been one of the enduring mysteries that surround the plane’s ­disappearance.

“That was not the first and last phone call,” he said of their conversation. “He had been calling me every week practically for the last 10 or 20 years.

“He’s a simulator instructor and the simulator is located near to my house. So each time when he wanted to go for simulator training, he would call me, ‘Are you in the house now? I want to visit you’.”

The 53-year-old said Zaharie loved to share travel stories and reminisce about childhood.

“We didn’t discuss much about aviation because we worked in the same company and we knew about the aircraft,” he said.

“Most of us had been with the airline for more than 25 years at that particular time so it’s a boring subject to talk about aircraft … we don’t want to talk about work.”

Police suspicions about the phone call became public when their initial investigative report from May 2014 was leaked online.

This information, including that Mr Zulhaimi had tried to call Zaharie’s mobile three times after the plane was announced missing, fuelled wild speculation about their conversation.

Late last year, members of an independent group of experts urged ­Malaysia to provide “confirmation of the role and technical area of expertise” of the aircraft engineer.

“What was the substance of that long conversation?” the experts had asked through the media.

“And who made the three attempts to contact Captain ­Zaharie Shah later on the morning of the disappearance?”

Mr Zulhaimi said he tried to call Zaharie three times between 10.27am and 11.12am on the day of the flight’s disappearance because he was in disbelief that his cousin’s flight was missing.

He had last seen Zaharie when the pilot and his wife, Faisah, visit­ed his home a few weeks earlier.

“He was around the neighbourhood, around my area, so he dropped by to see my kids,” he said. “Just to say hello. We chitchat for a while, about half an hour or one hour.

“He was a normal, jovial guy. I didn’t anticipate that some bad thing was going to happen. It was a big shock to me as well.”

Zaharie often dropped by Mr Zulhaimi’s Selangor home to visit his cousin’s children, who are now in their teens.

“He became much more closer to me, I think, because of my children,” Mr Zulhaimi said.

For Mr Zulhaimi, the five years since his cousin’s disappearance have passed slowly.

“The whole family has tried to forget about it,” he said.

“We just accept the fact that he’s dead by now, I think.

“I spoke to his elder brother, his sister, we accepted it. It’s become normal now.”