SEPANG, Malaysia - Malaysian authorities said some data were deleted from a flight simulator that one of the pilots of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet had built in his home, and they have turned to the FBI for help in recovering the data, in the hope that it will provide some clue to what happened to the plane.
Investigators have struggled to narrow the vast search zone for the plane, which stretches across two hemispheres. Meanwhile, relatives of some of the 227 passengers missing since the plane disappeared March 8 have angrily protested the Malaysian government’s handling of the sofar fruitless hunt.
Investigators have said the plane’s diversion from its intended course, from northeastward across the Gulf of Thailand to westward across the Malaysian peninsula, was probably carried out by someone on the plane who had aviation experience.
Attention has focused on the two pilots - Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and his junior officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27. The Malaysian police, who found that Zaharie had a flight simulator in his home, said Wednesday that some data were erased from the simulator Feb. 3, more than a month before the ill-fated flight.
“The experts are looking at what are the logs, what has been cleared,” said Tan Sri Khalid Bin Abu Bakar, inspector-general of the Malaysian police. He declined to comment further.
Because of evidence suggesting that whoever diverted the missing plane, a Boeing 777-200, knew how to disable the plane’s communications systems and make course changes, the data recorded in Zaharie’s flight simulator may shed light on whether he rehearsed such actions before the flight.
But building and using flight simulators at home is a popular hobby among aviation enthusiasts, and the deletion of data from his simulator may have been routine housekeeping with no significance to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which was bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense minister and acting transportation minister, emphasized that “the passengers, the pilots and the crew remain innocent until proven otherwise.”
He said authorities had received background-check information from the home countries of all the passengers on the plane except Ukraine and Russia. “So far, no information of significance on any passengers has been found,” he said.
It was not clear whether the Malaysians have asked U.S. law-enforcement officials for help with any other parts of their inquiry. The Malaysians have kept U.S. investigators at a distance since the plane vanished in the early hours of March 8, angering some lawmakers in Washington who believe the FBI should have been playing a larger role in the investigation from the beginning.
A small team of FBI agents in Malaysia has received briefings on the investigation but has not been asked to help with the inquiry.
Despite this, U.S. law-enforcement officials and intelligence analysts in Washington checked the names of the passengers on the plane to determine whether any of them had known links to terrorists, but that yielded no connections.
As part of the U.S. efforts, FBI agents conducted link analysis - a computer-based investigative technique that tries to discern connections between individuals based on extensive government and airline databases - on the pilots and on two Iranian passengers who were traveling with stolen passports.
The days since the plane disappeared from air controllers’ screens have been troubled by confusion that has compounded the anguish of family members waiting for news.
The frustrations felt by family members and friends of the missing Chinese passengers reached a head before a briefing by Malaysian officials Wednesday in a hotel conference room in Sepang. As reporters waited for the briefing to start, several protesters who said they represented families of the passengers unfurled a banner that read: “We oppose the Malaysian government concealing the truth. Delaying time for saving lives.”
“All our feelings are the same: We demand to know the truth,” said Xu Dengwang,one of the protesters. “It’s not about compensation, it’s about the truth.”
“We’ve waited, and waited, and waited, and Malaysia Airlines says kind words, but the Malaysian government hasn’t told us anything,” said Xu, a middle-aged man from Beijing who said a relative of his had been on Flight 370. About two thirds of the passengers on the plane were Chinese citizens.
After a scuffle, the police eventually pulled down the banner and forced the protesters out of the room.
Meanwhile, the plane’s whereabouts remain little more than a matter of educated guesswork, based on satellite signals and other data gleaned by analysts.
The United States has employed its constellation of spy satellites in the search since its earliest stages, and is now using the satellites’ ability to capture high-resolution images to help narrow down the search area, a senior U.S. military official said.
“The satellites are being used, but so far they haven’t found anything,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Michelle Innis of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/20/2014