Missing Plane: Police Probe Flight Engineer

Investigators say they are looking into the background of one of the passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

Mohd Khairul Amri Selamat said on social media sites he was a flight engineer working for a Swiss-based private jet charter company.

The 29-year-old's apparent experience means he would have a knowledge of in-flight computer systems and be able to carry out repairs.

However, as an engineer specialising in executive jets, he would not necessarily have had the skills required to divert and fly a Boeing 777.

A senior police official with knowledge of the investigation said: "The focus is on anyone who might have had aviation skills on that plane."


Authorities have also been focusing on the men at the controls - Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his first officer, Fariq Abdul Hamid.

Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said US intelligence was focusing on the two pilots.

The senior US politician also suggested hijackers may have landed the plane and be planning to use it "as a cruise missile" in a 9/11-style terror attack.
But a friend of Mr Zaharie has told Sky News he doubts he had anything to do with the jet's disappearance.

The search for the plane has dramatically widened as satellite data suggests the Boeing 777, which had 239 people on board, flew for at least seven hours - more than six hours after it lost contact with air traffic control.

It has been claimed it could have landed at one of more than 600 runways spread across at least a dozen countries.

Researchers at WNYC searched for runways with a length of at least 0.95 miles (1.52km) within a radius of 2,530 miles (4,070km) from the aircraft's last known position.

Some 634 runways, stretching from the India-Pakistan border to the northeast coast of Australia, matched those requirements - many of them in remote, inaccessible places

The number of countries involved in the search for the plane has nearly doubled over the past two days to 26, after satellite and military radar data projected two large corridors the plane might have flown through.

The northern corridor stretches in an arc over south and central Asia, while the other swoops deep into the southern Indian Ocean towards Australia.

Malaysia has announced that it was deploying its naval and air force assets to the southern corridor, with Australian vowing substantial assistance.

Some experts believe the plane is most likely to have flown southwest towards the Indian Ocean, as the northwesterly route would have taken it through numerous national airspaces in an area monitored extensively by satellites.

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