THE Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has invoked the country’s laws to refuse appeals for information about its search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, warning its employees that any leaks would lead to jail time.

ATSB chief commissioner Greg Hood has used the statute to reject a plea from families of Chinese passengers on MH370 that he grant a freedom of information request from The Australian, with the families claiming failure to do so makes Australia complicit with a cover-up by the Malaysian government.

Some ATSB officers are having second thoughts about the agency’s official line that MH370’s ­pilots were unconscious or dead at the end of the flight, the newspaper reported overnight.

Hood declared that the Transport Safety Investigation Act covers the FOI request for critical documents the ATSB claims support its “ghost flight” and “death dive” scenario, which holds the Boeing 777 went down in an unpiloted crash.

The theory has been rejected by commercial pilots and international air crash investi­gators, who believe Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end.

The documents sought are the opinions of international experts, including from the American and British air crash agencies, Boeing, aerospace group Thales, and British satellite group Inmarsat, about satellite data that automatically tracked the course of MH370.

The ATSB had said satellite data showed MH370 was in a rapid unpiloted dive at the end, but experts, such as former US captain and crash investigator John Cox, have said the data is not good enough to reach that conclusion.

ATSB general manager for strategic capability Colin McNamara in February refused The Australian’s original FOI ­request, claiming release of the ­information could “cause damage to the international relations of the commonwealth”.

The association representing the families of the 153 Chinese ­victims who died when the plane went down on March 8, 2014, ­issued a statement after The Australian reported McNamara’s decision, saying “we react with extreme displeasure and ­annoyance”.

“Is avoiding offending the ­Malaysian authorities more important than discovering the truth?” the families asked in the statement.

Flight MH370 disappeared on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, with its radar transponder turned off and radio communication cut after about 40 minutes.

Military radar and satellite tracking data shows the aircraft deviated back over Malaysia to the Andaman Sea, before a long track south to the southern Indian Ocean. A multi-million-ringgit search directed by the ATSB based on its “unresponsive pilots” theory failed to find the aircraft’s wreckage and was suspended in January.

After revelations last year that the FBI had discovered Zaharie had plotted a course quite close to the track on his home computer flight simulator, the ATSB joined the Malaysian government and Malaysia Airlines to hose down suggestions that this pointed to the “rogue pilot” hijack theory. – April 17, 2017.