KUALA LUMPUR, April 5 — A group of fishermen in the Maldives claim they have achieved something that searchers with their planes, satellites and ships have not been able to do for over a year: A visible sighting of Flight MH370.
According a report by the Weekend Australian, the self-professed eyewitnesses are baffled by investigators’ refusal to acknowledge their claims of spotting a plane with red and blue markings similar to what Malaysia Airlines (MAS) uses.
“I watched this very large plane bank slightly and I saw its colours — the red and blue lines — below the windows, then I heard the loud noise,” Abdu Rasheed Ibrahim, a court official and hobbyist fisherman, told the Australian newspaper.
“It was unusual, very unusual. It was big and it was flying low. It was a holiday (Saturday) and most people had gone to bed after praying.”
According to Abdul, his sighting was corroborated by others in his village, some of whom saw what he did while others heard the plane fly overhead. None knew then what it might have been, only learning later of the disappearance of MH370 once news broke.
Other accounts spoke of different circumstances, but like Abdul’s, the one common theme of the purported eyewitness accounts is the red-and-blue livery of the plane they all claim to have seen.
“I saw the blue and red on a bit of the side. I heard the loud noise of it after it went over. I told the police this too,” student Humaam Dhonmamk told the Weekend Australian.
“I’m very sure of what I saw on a very clear and bright day, and what I saw was not normal — the plane was very big, and low. I did not know until later that other people saw it too. I don’t know if it’s the Malaysian plane,” said Ahmed Shiyaam, a technician at a clinic.
Their claims, however, put the plane that went missing on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board thousands of kilometres north of where investigators conclude the flight ended, a conclusion that was arrived at using sophisticated calculations based on satellite communications from the Boeing.
Despite the improbability, a source privy to the police investigations in Maldives into the claims insist that the reports are not the work of glory hounds eager for attention.
“They are not dishonest and they have no motive to lie. They all told the police it was big, low and noisy. If it was not the missing plane, then which plane was it? We do not see planes close and low to KudaHuvadhoo. Nobody knows what has really happened,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.
While official, the conclusion that MH370 “ended somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean” is not universally accepted, primarily due to the complete lack of physical evidence from the plane despite months of searching.
Military expert Andre Milne previously called the theory that MH370 was in the Indian Ocean a “criminal act of fabrication of evidence” as the hypothesis was not in any way corroborated.
MH370 was officially declared an aviation accident on January 29 by the Malaysian Department of Civil Aviation, and its missing passengers and crew presumed dead.
An international search has yet to recover any wreckage from Flight MH370 since it vanished without a trace en route to Beijing, China, from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 last year.
- See more at:
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/m...laims-of-mh370-sightings#sthash.HnH2rWQI.dpuf
