Senior United States lawmakers said investigations into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have not returned any evidence that might suggest an act of terrorism, and that finding the plane or its wreckage is critical to understand what actually happened on board.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein told Sunday talk shows that they had seen no evidence of foul play at work in the case of Flight MH370.
“I have seen nothing yet that comes out of the investigation that would lead me to conclude that (this was) … anything other than a normal flight that something happened and something went wrong,” Rogers told Fox News Sunday.
US officials close to the investigation said last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had pored over data it received from the homemade flight simulator belonging to Flight MH370’s pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and hard drives belonging to Zaharie and his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, but found nothing of consequence.
Feinstein told CNN the Malaysian government was in charge of the search effort, and it would have to ask for additional search or intelligence resources from the US government.
“You can offer but you cannot demand,” Feinstein told CNN. “And so the Malaysians would have to ask.”
Teams from 26 countries using 60 aircraft and ships are still searching for the wreckage of Flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200ER which dropped off the radar on Saturday March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The jetliner was carrying 239 people on board. The search area has expanded from the South China Sea to include the Malacca Straits, Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. On March 24, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced that Flight MH370 ended its journey in the Indian Ocean, with no chance of survivors.
Story: Reuters
