MH370: RMAF chief denies airline signal was detected near Pulau Perak

Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) chief General Tan Sri Rodzali Daud has denied a report that he confirmed the RMAF base in Butterworth had detected the location signal of the missing MH370 flight in the vicinity of Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca at 2.40am on Saturday before all signals from the plane disappeared without a trace.

He said the report in the Malay-language daily Berita Harian on Tuesday which quoted him was incorrect.

“I wish to state that I did not make such statements. I request this misreporting be amended and corrected to prevent further misinterpretations of what is clearly an inaccurate and incorrect report,” he said in a statement issued late Tuesday night.

Berita Harian reported that Rodzali had confirmed that the RMAF Butterworth airbase detected the location signal of the airliner as indicating that it turned back from its original heading to the direction of Kota Bharu, Kelantan and was believed to have passed through the airspace of the East Coast and Northern Peninsular of Malaysia.

According to Rodzali he had been asked by a Berita Harian reporter if such an incident occurred as detailed in their story, however he did not give any answer to the question.

“What I said to the reporter was to refer to the statement which I have already made on March 9, 2014 during the press conference with the Armed Forces Chief at the Sama-Sama Hotel, Kuala Lumpur International Airport,” he said.

At the press conference, Rodzali said:

“The RMAF has not ruled out the possibility of an air turn back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar and this resulted in the Search and Rescue Operations being widened to the vicinity of the waters off Penang.”

Meanwhile news agency Reuters, quoting a senior Malaysian armed forces officer who has been briefed on investigations reported, “the aircraft had changed its course after passing Kota Bharu. It then descended to a lower altitude and flew over the Straits of Malacca”.

The Straits of Malacca is the one of the world’s busiest shipping channels between the East and the West.

The media report on Tuesday indicated to one thing: there are some inconsistencies from the first Malaysia Airlines statement a few hours after its Boeing 777-200 disappeared from the radar screens.

In its statement on March 8, flight MH370 was said to have been last detected in the South China Sea close to the shores of Vietnam.

Initially the plane was reported missing at 2.40am which was later corrected to 1.30am, just short of an hour after departing from KLIA at 12.14am. It was scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 6.30am.

Residents along the plane’s route had also claimed to have seen a low-flying aircraft at the time of its disappearance.

Search and rescue operations which had been mobilised since early Saturday morning have failed to find any sign of the plane in the South China Sea.

The operations to find the missing plane involve armed forces and authorities from Australia, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States, apart from Malaysia.

The discovery of new leads including oil slicks and debris was later dismissed as having any connection to the missing MH370.

Authorities then doubled the search radius to 100 nautical miles (185 kilometres) around the point where MH370 disappeared from radar.