Missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 flew off course for an hour at low altitude, before vanishing from radar screens at around 2.40 am local time Saturday, Malaysian military sources said Tuesday night.
"It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Strait of Malacca," a senior military official told Reuters. Malaysia Airlines previously said the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing vanished from air traffic control screens at 1.30 am, having taken off at 12.41 am.
Military radar last detected the Boeing 777 over the Strait, 550 km (340 miles) west of its intended flight path, leading to the search area being expanded to 100 nautical miles (115 miles; 185km) from the flight's last known location.
International search efforts for the aircraft have been beefed up, with at least 40 ships and 34 aircraft now combing the sea off Vietnam and Malaysia, looking for any clues or signs of wreckage.
Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble told a press conference that the two men who boarded the plane using stolen passports were "probably not terrorists", while CIA Director John Brennan announced that "no claims of responsibility" have been made by terrorist groups over the missing jet. "Clearly this is still a mystery, which is very disturbing," he said at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.
As search efforts enter a fifth day, new theories on what happened to the Malaysia Airlines jet and its 239 people on board are surfacing. William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, noted that the lack of distress call from the pilots “suggests something very sudden and very violent happened".
[Image: "MH370, We Are Waiting for You Back Home" displayed on a skyscraper at the Lujiazui Financial District in Shanghai on March 11. Via CNS]
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