Missing Malaysia flight: police investigate engineer

Suspicions that the flight’s disappearance is as a result of a deliberate act hardened over the weekend after it emerged that the last radio message from the cockpit, an informal “alright, good night”, was spoken after someone had begun disabling one of the plane’s automatic tracking systems.

Police said they are investigating anyone on the flight who may have had aviation skills. A senior police source said that the engineer, Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat, was one of those being investigated.

“Yes, we are looking into Mohd Khairul as well as the other passengers and crew,” the official told Reuters. “The focus is on anyone else who might have had aviation skills on that plane.”

The engineer, 29, has said on social media that he worked for a private jet charter company.

The informal sign-off, said as the plane was leaving Malaysian airspace, went against standard radio procedures – which would have called for instructions to have been read back. It is not known who gave the message from the cockpit.

Responding to a question from Channel 4 News Asia Correspondent John Sparks on Sunday (see below), asking if the ACARS system – a maintenance computer that relays data on the plane’s status – had been shut down before the “alright, good night” sign-off, Malaysia’s Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said: “The answer to your question is yes, it was disabled before.”

The Malaysia Airlines flight has been missing for more than a week, and satellite data suggests that it could be anywhere in two enormous arcs – one stretching from northern Thailand to the borders of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, the other from Indonesia into the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

On Sunday the chief executive of Malaysia Airlines said the plane had enough fuel to fly for around seven and a half hours.

Police special branch officers searched the homes of the captain, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid, in middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the international airport on Saturday.

Background checks are also being made on the 227 passengers on the flight.