MH370 was likely a mass murder-suicide by pilot

By Laura Italiano

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An Australian Air Force captain looks down at the Indian Ocean for remnants of missing flight MH370 in March 2014.Photo: AP

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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was likely steered into the sea intentionally, by its own captain, in a pre-planned mass murder-suicide, a new report reveals.

In an exclusive story posted online Friday, New York magazine says that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, “conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances.”

The story cites as its source a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation.

It took the FBI to discover the grim news of the captain’s apparent suicide test runs, the magazine said.

After the plane disappeared in march of 2014 — with 239 passengers and crew aboard — Malaysian investigators seized the hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on “an elaborate home-built flight simulator,” the magazine said.

But key data on the hard drives had been deleted. Malaysian investigators handed them over to the FBI, which was able to recover six deleted “data points” that had been stored by the Microsoft Flight Simulator X program in the weeks before the plane vanished, the magazine said.

Each data point records something about the simulated flight, including altitude, speed, location and direction. The deleted records showed that the captain’s simulated flight departed from Kuala Lumpur, veered over the Southern Indian Ocean, and then kept going to the point where fuel would be exhausted over an empty stretch of sea.

Search officials believe Flight 370 did exactly that, veering off course and then ceasing communications before plummeting into the water without a trace.

Malaysia has kept under wraps any news of the captain’s apparent suicide test run, but rumors of what the FBI had uncovered have long circulated, the magazine said.

Earlier Friday, officials announced that the more than two-year long hunt for any remains from the flight would soon be called off, an announcement that angered families of the passengers and crew.

So far, the futile search for remains has been the most expensive in aviation history, costing the equivalent of $135 million.

http://nypost.com/2016/07/22/mh370-was-likely-a-mass-murder-suicide-by-pilot/