3/17/14, "Australia leads southern search for missing plane," BBC
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3/16/14, "As U.S. Looks for Terror Links in Plane Case, Malaysia Rejects Extensive Help," NY Times,
There
are just two F.B.I. agents in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital,
where local investigators are hunting for clues that the two pilots or
any of the other 237 people on board had links to militant groups or
other motives to hijack the flight.
In
the days after the plane went missing on March 8, American
investigators scoured their huge intelligence databases for information
about those on board but came up dry.
“We just don’t have the right to just take over the investigation,” said
a senior American official who, like others, spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “There’s not a whole
lot we can do absent of a request from them for more help or a
development that relates to information we may have.”...
A
central puzzle is why anyone would hijack a jetliner and then fly it
for hours over the open ocean, as seems to be the most likely case. On
Saturday, the Malaysian authorities opened a criminal inquiry
after learning that two tracking devices aboard the aircraft had been
turned off several minutes apart, indicating deliberate action, and that
the plane appeared to have flown for as long as seven hours more....
Several
senior American officials have played down the possibility that a
terrorist network was behind the plane’s disappearance because no group
has claimed responsibility for it. They said intelligence agencies had
not detected chatter among terrorists about such a plot....
In
response to the news that Malaysian authorities had taken a flight
simulator from the chief pilot’s home, American officials said that they
were eager to know what the investigators had found and were willing to
help search the computers. But as of Sunday afternoon, the officials
said they knew little about the findings....
“If it is a criminal act where the pilot decided to crash the airliner,
there is little the U.S. can do,” said Rick Nelson, vice president of
business development
at Cross Match Technologies and a former senior counterterrorism
official. “It’s very difficult to stop someone who one day decides to
crash a plane. It is difficult to predict and to mitigate.”
The
F.B.I., which has had an agent based at the United States Embassy in
Kuala Lumpur for more than a decade, has developed a working
relationship with law enforcement officials there in recent years. But
American officials said they believed that the Malaysian leaders had
rebuffed their offers of assistance because they did not want to appear
as though they needed help with such a high-profile investigation.
Because
two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese, one group with a conceivable
motive to hijack the plane would be militant members of the Muslim
Uighur ethnic group in China. Malaysian and Chinese news reports
identified one passenger as Uighur, but American officials said they had
no evidence that the passenger was associated with militant groups."...
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3/17/14, "Australia leads southern search for missing plane," BBC
"Australia will take
control of the "southern vector" search for the missing Malaysian plane,
its PM says, as a multinational effort continues.
Australian PM Tony Abbott said he was responding to Malaysia's request and would add more resources to the search....
Malaysian officials said on Sunday that the last words from the cockpit - "All right, good night" - came after the the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits key information about the plane to the ground, had been deliberately switched off.
On Saturday police searched the homes of Captain Zaharie Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid. Investigators are also looking at passengers, engineers and other ground staff who may have had contact with the aircraft before take-off.
The plane, which left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 00:40 local time (16:40 GMT) on 8 March, disappeared off air traffic controllers' screens at about 01:20.
Investigators are trying to obtain more radar and satellite data from any of the countries that the plane may have passed over, with its 239 crew and passengers.
Mr Abbott told parliament on Monday that Malaysian Prime Minister Nazib Razak asked Australia to "take responsibility for the search on the southern vector, which the Malaysian authorities now think was one possible flight path for this ill-fated aircraft".
"I agreed that we would do so. I offered the Malaysian prime minister additional maritime surveillance resources which he gratefully accepted."
The southern search area covers the Indian Ocean."
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