Malaysia Airlines Flight Fell Victim To ‘Act Of Piracy’ Says U.S. Official

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may have fallen victim to “an act of piracy” and may even have landed at an unknown location. That is the line of thought now favored by United States investigators looking into what happened to the mysteriously vanished Boeing 777-200, according to one U.S. official who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press Friday.

The official could not let the AP use his name because he is not authorized to speak to the media about the Malaysia Airlines flight investigation.

New theories about what happened to the missing flight seem to crop up every day, but the line of thinking described by the unnamed official appears to be gaining a high level of credibility among investigators, at least on the American side of the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

The new avenue of investigation, that the disappearance of Flight 370 may have been deliberately caused by a person or persons on board who commandeered the flight, is in line with earlier reports from The Wall Street Journal, whose aviation expert Andy Pasztor said Thursday that “something weird and bizarre happened in the cockpit” of the missing flight.

The Washington Post also reported that the Malaysia Airlines flight apparently remained in the air for as long as four hours after its two communications were lost — but investigators now believe that the systems were switched off deliberately because they shut down not simultaneously as in a sudden explosion, but one after the other, about 14 minutes apart.

And Friday morning, the news agency Reuters reported that military radar tracked an unidentified plane flying west on the night that the Malaysia Airlines flight vanished. The mystery plane, which investigators now believe to have been Flight 370, was navigating a route reserved for flights headed to Europe and the Middle East, not to Beijing where the xflight was headed, on its way from Kuala Lumpur.

Sources told Reuters that the plane was in all likelihood being flown by someone who knew those westbound routes well, either the plane’s own pilots who deliberately took the plane hundreds of miles off course for some unknown reason — or another person with training in or knowledge of commercial aviation.

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” a Malaysian police official told Reuters.

If the plane is not found by this evening, U.S. East Coast time, it will mark a full week that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will have been missing without a single piece of evidence or definitive lead about where the aircraft — or the 239 human beings on board — might have ended up.