The captain of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 received a
two-minute call shortly before take-off from a mystery woman using a
mobile phone number obtained under a false identity.
It was one of the last calls made to or from the mobile of Captain
Zaharie Ahmad Shah in the hours before the Malaysian jet left Kuala
Lumpur 16 days ago.
Investigators are treating it as potentially significant because
anyone buying a pay-as-you-go SIM card in Malaysia has to fill out a
form giving their identity card or passport number.
Family man: Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah with his wife Faizah Khan and two of their three children.
Introduced as an anti-terrorism measure following 9/11, this ensures that every number is registered to a traceable person.
But in this case police traced the number to a shop selling SIM cards
in Kuala Lumpur. They found that it had been bought ‘very recently’ by
someone who gave a woman’s name – but was using a false identity.
The discovery raises fears of a possible link between Captain
Zaharie, 53, and terror groups whose members routinely use untraceable
SIM cards. Everyone else who spoke to the pilot on his phone in the
hours before the flight took off has already been interviewed.
In a separate development, The Mail on Sunday has learned that
investigators are now poised to question Captain Shah’s estranged wife
in detail.
They have waited two weeks out of respect, but will now begin
formally interviewing Faizah Khan following pressure from FBI agents
assisting the inquiry.
Although the couple – who have three children – were separated, they
had been living under the same roof. A source said: ‘Faizah has been
spoken to gently by officers but she has not been questioned in detail
to establish her husband’s behaviour and state of mind in the days
leading to the incident.
‘This is partly for cultural reasons. It is not considered
appropriate in Malaysia to subject people in situations of terrible
bereavement to the stress of intensive questioning.’
The softly-softly approach has been challenged by the team of FBI
agents working with Malaysian police. They have pointed out that she may
hold ‘vital clues and information’ to Zaharie’s mental state.
‘The whole world is looking for this missing plane and the person who
arguably knows most about the state of mind of the man who captained
the plane is being left alone,’ said a source close to the FBI team.
The source added: ‘If we want to eliminate the chief pilot from the
inquiry, we must interview her in detail to find out what his state of
mind was.’
The mystery caller emerged when Malaysian investigators examined the
phone records of both Zaharie and his co-pilot, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul
Hamid. Investigators were keen to trace the caller and interview them,
although they have stressed that the fact the SIM card was registered to
a non-existent ID card does not necessarily indicate a criminal or
terrorist connection.
Political activists in Malaysia sometimes use SIM cards bought with
bogus identity cards if they fear that their phones may be bugged by the
country’s authoritarian ruling party.
The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that Zaharie is an avid
supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, a distant relative, and
may have attended a controversial court hearing where Anwar was jailed
for five years. It took place only a few hours before the flight. The
timing of the call has intensified scrutiny on Zaharie as investigators
struggle to establish whether the cockpit crew, a catastrophic accident
or hijackers are to blame for Flight MH370’s disappearance.
Meanwhile FBI experts in the US are continuing to examine the hard
drive of a flight simulator seized from Zaharie’s home after it emerged
that programs he used on it had been deleted. Zaharie used the home
flight simulator to practise extreme landings, including on remote
Indian Ocean islands such as the US air base in Diego Garcia,
investigators have revealed.
The hard drive was flown to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia,
at the end of last week after Malaysian investigators failed to
retrieve the deleted files, which they suspect may have been ‘buried’ in
an elaborate process to cover the user’s tracks.
The delay in handing the computer hard drive to the FBI has proved
to be a source of friction between the Malaysian and US investigators,
the source close to the FBI said, adding: ‘We have the technology to do
this work quickly and effectively and they simply don’t.’
Malaysia’s acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein yesterday
said investigators are coming under increasing pressure as they are
aware that time is running out – the black box voice and data recorder
only transmits an electronic signal for about 30 days before its battery
runs out.
But he claimed a thorough investigation of the plane’s cargo manifest
had not shown ‘any link to anything that may have contribution to the
plane’s disappearance’.
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