Flight MH370 mystery: India, Pakistan, Taliban ‘know nothing’ about Malaysian airliner

Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan also say no unidentified planes entered their air space on March 8.

NEW DELHI/ PESHAWAR:

Aviation officials in Pakistan, India and Central Asia as well as Taliban militants said they knew nothing about the whereabouts of a missing Malaysian jetliner on Monday after the search for Flight MH370 extended into their territory.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8 about an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard and investigators are now increasingly convinced it was diverted thousands of miles off course.

Malaysia said it had sent diplomatic notes to all countries along an arc of northern and southern search corridors including India and Pakistan, requesting radar and satellite information as well as land, sea and air search operations.



Indian defence officials rejected the possibility of a plane flying for hours above the country undetected. “The idea that the plane flew through Indian airspace for several hours without anyone noticing is bizarre,” a defence ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“These are wild reports, without any basis,” he said, adding a pilot would have to know the precise location of all Indian radars and surveillance systems to be able to get around them.

Explaining why this was unlikely, he said surveillance was so tight on India’s border facing its arch-rival Pakistan that the air force scrambled a pair of Sukhoi fighters last month after an unidentified object showed up on the radar. It turned out to be a weather balloon drifting towards the Pakistan border.

The Indian foreign minister rejected suggestions that his country could have been the intended target of a 9/11-style attack by the missing airliner. Asked by the CNN-IBN network about suggestions that the plane was hijacked with the aim of flying it into an Indian city, Salman Khurshid replied: “I don’t think we have gone that far.”

The speculation was fuelled by former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott who tweeted that the “direction, fuel load & range now lead some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city”.



Pakistani officials said they had detected nothing suspicious in the skies after the plane vanished. “We have checked the radar recording for the period but found no clue about the ill-fated flight,” the Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement.

Central Asian countries Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, at the northern end of the search arc, said no unidentified planes had entered their air space on March 8.

“Even if all on-board equipment is switched off, it is impossible to fly through in a silent mode,” the Kazakh Civil Aviation Committee said in a statement sent to Reuters. “There are also military bodies monitoring the country’s air space.”

As the search widened, some observers suggested the plane might have flown to mountainous areas abutting Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan where Taliban militants are holed up.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan said the missing plane had nothing to do with them. “It happened outside Afghanistan and you can see that even countries with very advanced equipment and facilities cannot figure out where it went,” he said.

“So we also do not have any information as it is an external issue.”

A Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander said that his group could only dream about such an operation. “We wish we had an opportunity to hijack such a plane,” he told Reuters by telephone from North Waziristan Agency.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 18^th, 2014.