The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 nearly six years ago remains one of aviation's great mysteries.
The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, literally disappeared off the radar screen, and even the bits and pieces of wreckage found months later in the Indian Ocean hasn't fully explained the incident.
Now former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the "top levels" of the Malaysian government have always had an idea what happened.
In an interview with Sky News for a documentary, Abbott said high-ranking Malaysian officials long believed veteran pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately downed the jet in a murder-suicide plot that killed all 239 passengers and crew.
"My very clear understanding, from the very top levels of the Malaysian government, is that from very, very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot," said Abbott, who was Australia's prime minster from 2013 to 2015. "I'm not going to say who said what to whom, but let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot."
Australia worked closely with Malaysia, China and several other countries in a coordinated effort to find that plane that lasted three years before the search was abandoned.
If true, the scenario would be eerily similar to what happened a year later, in March of 2015, when Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked himself inside the cockpit when the pilot stepped out and guided the flight into the side of a mountain in a remote French village.
Malaysia's former prime minister and police chief said there was no conclusive proof of a murder-suicide plot. Former Prime Minister Najib Razak told the Free Malaysia Today online portal that a possible pilot suicide was never ruled out but it would be "unfair and legally irresponsible" to pin the blame on Zaharie as the black boxes had not been found.
Malaysian police chief Abdul Hamid Bador, who was one of the investigators, told local media that there was no evidence of Zaharie's involvement and that the plane's disappearance was still a mystery. Former Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said in a statement that investigators had "explored every single lead and possibility" but found no conclusive answer to why the plane vanished.
A Malaysian-led independent investigation report released in 2018 said the plane's course was changed manually but did not name a suspect and raised the possibility of "intervention by a third party." Investigators, however, said the cause of the disappearance couldn't be determined until the wreckage and the plane's black boxes are found.
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