The Hunt for MH370

by Ean Higgins

  But this remains the biggest enigma: what would have motivated Zaharie to meticulously plan, then carry out, such a heinous crime?

  There is no one clear answer, but a few tantalising clues.

  While there was a lot of good journalistic work done by Malaysian and international reporters investigating Zaharie in the first days and weeks after 8 March 2014, it yielded more smoke than flame as to motive. He was said to have split from his wife, but she denied it, making it another murky case of ‘he said/she said’.

  An examination of his many social media posts showed Zaharie liked cooking, particularly noodle dishes, though not as much as he liked aviation: one post shows him with some mates playing with a model flying boat on a lake. There was nothing jihadist; he actually posted condolences to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He seemed to have some interest in debates about atheism and rationalism. There was nothing coming even close to a smoking gun in terms of suicidal, political or terrorist motive. All the interviews with his friends and colleagues described him as a genial, easygoing, fun guy.

  The most promising lead was the link with Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition figure and de facto leader of the People’s Justice Party in Malaysia, and the fact that hours before the flight Anwar had been convicted of sodomy and sentenced to five years in jail in what was widely seen as a political trial. There were some reports Zaharie had attended the court hearing, but that was never conclusively established. Anwar, who was free in the days after the disappearance of MH370 pending appeal, was grilled by media outlets about the connections.

  Anwar said Zaharie was certainly a supporter, as a member of his political party, and he recognised him from photos of party meetings. He said he had been unable to establish whether Zaharie had been in court on the day, but said friends had said the pilot had been upset and disgusted by the conviction. Finally, Anwar said he had determined Zaharie was a distant relative of his daughter-in-law. But Anwar said the suggestion Zaharie had taken 238 people to their deaths as a protest against his conviction was absurd and grossly unfair.

  The Australian’s South-east Asia correspondent, Amanda Hodge, spoke to Sivarasa Rasiah, a People’s Justice Party MP and long-time lawyer for Anwar.

  In a joint article, Hodge and I reported Sivarasa saying he had befriended Zaharie after he joined the party ahead of the 2013 elections, in which Anwar’s party won the popular vote but lost the election. The two men bonded after belting out a particularly tortured karaoke duet of ‘Hotel California’ at a party fundraising effort in 2012 and Sivarasa says they just ‘sort of took to each other’. The last time he remembers catching up with the amiable pilot was when Zaharie dropped in with a bottle of Chivas Regal for the Indian Malaysian MP during the Hindu festival of Deepavali.

  ‘Pilot suicide is rubbish as far as I’m concerned. Absolutely no way,’ Sivarasa told The Australian. ‘I knew he had marital issues. Everyone in his circle knew.’

  Sivarasa also dismissed the idea that his friend might have hijacked the plane in fury at Anwar’s second sodomy conviction, handed down just five hours before MH370 took off. There would have been no time to plan for such an event from the time Anwar was convicted at 7:30pm to the time the Beijing-bound flight became airborne. Sivarasa said he was ‘quite sure’ Zaharie was not present in court on the day Anwar was convicted.

  The other nagging problem with the theory that Zaharie hijacked the plane as a protest is that whoever was at the controls issued no public communication of any sort that this was a political statement.

  Malaysian political scientist Wong Chin Huat told CNN at the time that while it was quite reasonable to query the motivations of everyone possibly involved, he thought any link with Malaysian domestic politics was ‘a red herring’.

  ‘Had the captain intended to cause this incident in protest, there should be clearly some clue. It’s pointless to make a political statement in silence,’ he said.

  A mentionable fact in the mix is that among those Australian next-of-kin with whom I have spoken, there is no resolve to blame Zaharie. Danica Weeks said she was reluctant, in the absence of concrete evidence, to accept Zaharie took down MH370, and with it her husband Paul.

  ‘I just think it’s unfair to crucify someone without the proof,’ she said.

  Like Danica, Zaharie’s wife had lost her husband. Danica said to further heap innuendo on the family by alleging pilot hijack would be unfair.

  The next-of-kin have become hunters of their own for MH370. They have been studying aviation, the Boeing 777 and precedents, and following the theories. Danica favours another scenario canvassed later in the book, of onboard fire.

  ‘I believe there was an incident on the plane, possibly exploding oxygen tanks, and the pilot tried to turn the plane back to Kuala Lumpur. Hypoxia set in and the plane flew on for seven hours,’ Danica said. She said if the plane had been hijacked, Paul would have intervened. ‘He’s a big strong guy, he’s from the army. He’d be there. He would have fought tooth and nail.’

  Jeanette Maguire, whose sister Cathy Lawton disappeared on MH370, has similar inclinations.

  As to Zaharie, she said, ‘I can’t lay blame. I feel for the families when there is no proof. It’s unfair to blame someone who can’t defend themselves.’ Rather, Jeanette said, ‘my first thought was fire. The ACARS has to be shut down if there’s a fire. There was something which happened on board, they had to turn everything off to isolate this fire,’ she said. ‘I thought of a hijacking, but no-one was coming forward, and that sort of scenario would be harder to comprehend after 9/11.’

  Jeanette said she spent a lot of time talking to ATSB officials and they were, she said, ‘very good with my theories and understanding airplanes and how they work’.

  ‘That’s how I spent the first couple of years, investigating, trying to do my own type scenarios. I have done nothing but google airplanes since that day.’

  One good practice in journalism is to, months or even years after the immediate circus of a massive international story with a mystery to it breaks, revisit it to see with the passage of time who will now talk, and what might now be found out.

  In late 2018, multi award-winning journalist Paul Toohey, with whom I worked at The Australian, had another look at Zaharie’s social media activity, particularly on Facebook. What he found and published in Sydney’s The Sunday Telegraph suggested two of the characteristics already known about the pilot – that he intensely liked younger women and intensely disliked the Malaysian Prime Minister – were far more pronounced than had previously been made out.

  ‘Zaharie was not merely politically active, as some have said,’ Toohey wrote. ‘He was virulent, at one point labelling then prime minister Najib Razak a “moron” on his Facebook page.’

  More salaciously, Toohey revealed, in 2013 Zaharie had apparently developed an obsession with Penang-based model Qi Min Lan, also known as Jasmin Min, who had turned 18 that year.

  Zaharie did not know the young woman personally – and she never responded to his posts – but he was ‘fixated’, Toohey wrote.

  The pilot’s posts on Facebook directed at the model included ‘you’re hot’, ‘tasty’, and ‘gorgeous’.

  Toohey quoted psychologists who said the pattern of behaviour demonstrated obsessiveness and recklessness.

  Two years earlier, The Australian’s Amanda Hodge had found a woman Zaharie did know personally, and was clearly deeply involved with in one way or other. Through good old-fashioned journalistic legwork, Hodge in September 2016 got the sensational break on Zaharie which opened up a new direction for the MH370 debate.

  Hodge tracked down Fatima Pardi, a former kindergarten teacher and then a worker with the People’s Justice Party. She told Hodge she met Zaharie when he joined the party and began attending political events. Pardi said Zaharie had become her mentor and a father figure for her children, one of whom suffers from severe cereb
ral palsy.

  She insisted it was not a sexual affair.

  ‘Of course there was gossip, people will always talk whether you’re good or you’re bad,’ Pardi told Hodge. ‘People think I am the “other woman”. But we were close because the children loved him.’

  The relationship ended a few months before the plane went missing, but Pardi claimed to have had a WhatsApp exchange with Zaharie two days before the flight.

  ‘That last conversation was just between me and him. I don’t want to talk about it,’ Pardi told Hodge.

  ‘I’m afraid what I say will be misunderstood,’ she said. ‘It was a personal matter, a private issue.’

  She added that Zaharie had not seemed stressed.

  Hodge’s interview with Pardi was, literally, a world exclusive; the Malaysian woman had not spoken to the media before. Pardi told Hodge the only reason she did so was to dispel any thought Zaharie was the sort of man who would take 238 people to their deaths; she said he was fine and generous.

  ‘We both wanted to make a change for our country. That’s why we were involved in politics,’ she said.

  ‘We talked about family, we talked about interests and that’s how he got close with me and my children.’

  Zaharie himself had three grown-up children, in their 20s at the time of MH370’s vanishing.

  Zaharie’s elder sister Sakinab Shah has described her brother – the eighth of nine children and the family favourite – as an enormously affectionate individual ‘who loved life, loved fun’.

  She acknowledged, in an interview with Hodge, that her brother and his wife, Faizah, had ‘normal’ marital problems, but said he wore his troubles lightly. Sakinab Shah confirmed Pardi had contacted her after MH370 went missing and that the two had met, but she was one of several of her brother’s women friends she had met over the years.

  ‘Honestly, I have met many, many other friends of his. A lot of times I gave him a telling-off about this. It was never anything serious,’ she said. ‘He was naughty, I admit that, but at the end of the day he always went home.’

  So, when it comes to one clear, decisive, indisputable reason or motive for Zaharie to hijack his own aircraft and kill all on board, the professional investigators, the journalistic community and the international MH370 club addicts are still looking for one.

  The thing about a lot of truly dreadful crimes, though, is that the driver may be hidden, even to the perpetrator. While modern society likes to find clear explanations, believes they must be there, and feels better when they are found, sometimes, experts say, they just aren’t.

  In a story looking at the Germanwings case, the BBC explored what motivates aviation mass murder-suicide. The broadcaster quoted Simon Wessely, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, saying sometimes it’s just too hard to tell.

  ‘It’s possible something will emerge, but in most suicides people leave clues or a message. Incredibly extreme events like this are sometimes just inexplicable.’

  The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains baffling today, just as it was to Malaysian authorities in the early hours of 8 March 2014, and the days after that.

  TWO

  INTO THIN AIR

  The night of Friday, 7 March 2014, was one of the rare times when Malaysia’s civil aviation boss’s mobile phone ran out of power.

  Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, then chief of the Civil Aviation Department, had been to a family dinner: his niece was to be married at the weekend, and it had been a festive pre-wedding get together, so he was ready for sleep. He put his phone on charge, and went to bed without waiting for it to acquire enough power to start up again.

  It was only after pre-dawn prayers next morning that he switched on his phone. A flood of messages started streaming in, and Azharuddin stared at the screen in disbelief as they appeared by the dozen. As he later related in the excellent 2018 British television documentary MH370: Inside the Situation Room: ‘I straightaway told my wife, something is not right.’

  That turned out to be the understatement of the year. At that point Azharuddin did not know Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had vanished into thin air. He also had no idea that MH370 would ultimately cost him his job, four years later.

  Azharuddin made some calls and asked some of his senior officers to meet him at the Sama-Sama Hotel where the first press conference was to be held. In a 2018 interview with the New Straits Times, Azharuddin described his thoughts at the time.

  ‘I said to myself: “My God, a Triple Seven . . . that’s a big jet”. Initially, I thought it was just another airplane that went off our radar scopes . . . but in this industry, we are trained to prepare for the worst-case scenario.’

  The air traffic controllers under Azharuddin’s authority should have been trained better for the worst-case scenario; when MH370 disappeared, disbelief, confusion and panic set in.

  After advising MH370 to switch to Ho Chi Minh control, and hearing Zaharie acknowledge with ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’ at 1:19am, Kuala Lumpur controllers’ interest in the flight had waned, as they assumed their Vietnamese counterparts were on the case. Their attention was jolted back pretty quickly when, at 1:39am, Ho Chi Minh air traffic controllers said MH370 had not contacted them and, even more alarming, secondary radar contact was lost at BITOD, a waypoint not far after IGARI. The segments below are from the official transcript of the air traffic control communications as published by the Malaysian safety investigation, verbatim except for the removal of some superfluous pauses like ‘eer’ or ‘ahhh’. The transcription may not have been perfect from the sometimes scratchy recordings, and the controllers and other officials were talking in the international language of aviation – English – which was not their native tongue. But the gist of the content and tenor are clear.

  Ho Chi Minh air traffic control (HCM): Any information on Malaysian Three Seven Zero, sir?

  Kuala Lumpur air traffic control (KL): Malaysian Three Seven Zero already transfer to you right?

  HCM: Yeah, yeah, I know at time two zero. But we have no . . . just about in contact . . . after BITOD we have no . . . radar lost with him. The other one here to track identified on my radar.

  KL: Okay at what point?

  HCM: And no contact right now.

  KL: At what point?

  HCM: Yeah.

  KL: At what point?

  HCM: Yeah.

  KL: At what point you lost contact?

  HCM: BITOD.

  KL: BITOD, hah.

  HCM: Yeah.

  KL: BITOD. Okay. Call you back.

  This communication was 19 minutes after Zaharie should have contacted Ho Chi Minh controllers and when they should have taken over responsibility for guiding the flight. The agreement governing air traffic control between the two countries specifies that ‘the accepting unit shall notify the transferring unit if two-way communication is not established within five (5) minutes of the estimated time over the Transfer of Control Point’. That is, if the MH370 pilots had not radioed Ho Chi Minh control by 1:25am, five minutes after the transfer was to have taken place, those Vietnamese controllers should have contacted Kuala Lumpur to ask what was going on. Instead, they waited another 14 minutes. By this time, MH370 was flying back over Malaysia. The controllers in Ho Chi Minh and Kuala Lumpur could not have known that though and, with a disappeared airliner on their hands, they desperately tried to work out what had happened to it.

  At 1:41am, Ho Chi Minh again asked for information on MH370, and the reply was that, after IGARI, MH370 did not return to the Kuala Lumpur frequency. Seconds later, a Kuala Lumpur controller made a ‘blind transmission’ to MH370. That’s when there has been a break in communications, and the controller wants to contact an aircraft not with any specific navigational instruction but just to re-establish contact.

  ‘Malaysia Three Seven Zero, do you read?’ the controller a
sked.

  There was no response. Five minutes after that, the Vietnamese controllers told their Malaysian counterparts they had tried to contact the aircraft numerous times over 20 minutes. Clearly alarmed, the controllers tried other things – making calls on other frequencies including emergency channels, and through other aircraft in the area, asking their pilots to try to reach MH370 by relay, with no result. The note of panic, and positioning of whose fault this looming crisis was, can be detected in the transcript.

  At 1:58am, the following exchange took place:

  HCM: Could you check back for your side?

  KL: Okay we will do that, and the first, at IGARI did you ever in contact with the aircraft or not first place?

  HCM: Negative sir, we have radar contact only, not verbal contact.

  KL: But no, when aircraft passed IGARI did the aircraft call you?

  HCM: Negative sir.

  KL: Negative? Why you didn’t tell me first within five minutes? You should have called me.

  HCM: After BITOD seven minutes we have no radar contact, then ask you.

  As 2:00am came round, it had been 40 minutes since the aircraft had, as far as the controllers could see, vanished from the face of the earth, but then red herrings started to further confuse the situation.

  Kuala Lumpur controllers had been in discussions with Malaysia Airlines’ operations centre, and relayed to the Vietnamese that they had been informed MH370 was in Cambodian airspace. But the Ho Chi Minh controllers queried that, saying they had been in touch with their counterparts in Phnom Penh who had no word on MH370 and were just as much in the dark – the flight plan did not call for the aircraft to transit Cambodia. Kuala Lumpur said they would check back with their supervisor.