MH370 'may have been diverted'

Photo taken on March 14 shows a pilot checks flight route during the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. (Photo/China News Service)

A new investigation into the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 suggested it was last headed out over the Andaman Islands, raising suspicions that the flight was deliberately diverted, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.   [Special coverage]

The information was echoed in an AP report, which quoted a US official as saying that investigators are examining the possibility that someone caused the disappearance of the plane and that it may have been "an act of piracy."

The official also said key evidence for "human intervention" in the plane's disappearance is that contact with its transponder stopped about a dozen minutes before a messaging system quit.

The fact that the plane had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone on board had turned off its communication systems, sources told Reuters.

"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," Reuters quoted a third investigative source as saying, who is a senior Malaysian police official.

As the baffling mystery remains unsolved after a week, the latest radar evidence is consistent with the expansion of the search for the aircraft, which, according to Malaysian authorities on Friday, had expanded to the Andaman Islands and the Indian Ocean.

Indian aircraft Friday combed Andaman and Nicobar, made up of more than 500 mostly uninhabited islands, for signs of the plane.

The Indian Navy has deployed two Dornier planes to fly across the island chain, Indian military spokesman Harmeet Singh said in the state capital, Port Blair. So far the planes, and a helicopter searching the coast, had found nothing.

Malaysia Airlines said on Friday that it does not rule out the possibility of a hijacking or other disaster.

Malaysia's civil aviation chief confirmed on Friday that the government was working with US investigators to establish if there was any satellite information that could help locate the airliner.

Meanwhile, a geosciences lab with the University of Science and Technology of China said Friday that earthquake observation stations had detected an incident on the neighboring seabed at 2:55 am on March 8, some 90 minutes after air traffic controllers lost signals with MH370.

The lab said one of the two potential locations of the incident is 116 kilometers northeast of MH370's last confirmed location. Since the area is a non-seismic region, the lab said the signals picked up by the stations could be caused by the crash of the plane, adding that the strength of the signal indicates that the crash was catastrophic.

By noon on Friday, China had dispatched eight vessels and searched more than 63,000 square kilometers of sea. Haixun 31, a patrol vessel under the Ministry of Transport, left the Gulf of Thailand on Friday night for the Strait of Malacca to conduct more search tasks.

There has been no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage as the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries scour the seas across Southeast Asia.

Relatives of Chinese passengers still clung to hope that the aircraft might have been hijacked and their loved ones could somehow still be alive. They demanded answers about the missing plane at a meeting with airline officials on Friday.

The mystery of the whereabouts of the plane deepened further as the Beijing Times reported on Weibo that a female relative received an unanswered call on Friday morning from a number belonging to her father, who was a passenger on the missing plane. The relative called back but the phone had been switched off.

"The longer the search efforts take, the larger the damage. Not only emotional damage, but legal and financial damage as the prolonged process will inevitably complicate filing of compensation," Zheng Chunjie, a lawyer from the Beijing Celue Law Firm, told the Global Times on Friday.

Vietnam on Friday dispatched planes and ships to search an newly found oil slick zone said to be some 20 kilometers long.