Relatives of Chinese passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet threatened to go on hunger strike today, as it was claimed a person with flight training used a computer system to divert the plane from its route.
The threat, prompted by an alleged lack of information from Malaysian authorities, was issued at a Beijing hotel where families of some of the 153 Chinese passengers on Flight MH370 have been waiting for news of its fate.
One relative bore a sheet of paper with the message: “Hunger strike. Tell us the truth. Return us our families.”
A woman held a placard reading: “Respect life. Give us back our families.” She said: “Since they haven’t given us the truth about those people’s lives, all of us are protesting. All the relatives are facing mental breakdowns.” Wen Wancheng, whose son was one of 239 people on board, said relatives were angry the Malaysian ambassador had not come to the hotel to pass on news: “The ambassador should be presenting himself here. But he’s not. Relatives are very unsatisfied. So you hear them saying, ‘Hunger strike.’”
MH370 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished from air traffic control screens over the South China Sea at 1.21am on March 8. At 2.15am military radar spotted it over the Malacca Straits to the west — the opposite direction from its planned route.
Today, the New York Times quoted US officials saying the first turn to the west was carried out through a computer system. The report said the computer was likely to have been programmed by a person in the cockpit who had knowledge of aircraft technology. It appears to confirm the claim by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak that the flight was deliberately diverted.
It also emerged that one passenger was a Chinese student in Britain. Yue Wenchao, 26, of University of Hull Business School, wrote “See you in Beijing!” next to a photo of his girlfriend on website Weibo an hour before he boarded, the Singapore’s Strait Times reported.
The last trace of the plane was a signal picked up by a satellite at 8.11am on March 8, which suggested it could have flown for a further seven hours. Some 26 countries are helping search a huge arc from the Indian Ocean in the south to central Asia in the north.
Malaysia’s acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein told the daily news briefing that nations had been asked to recheck their radar to try to narrow the hunt. Each of the two search zones is split into seven “quadrants” of 160,000 square nautical miles apiece.
