MALAYSIA allegedly knew “very early on” that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot, said former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott.

Abbott, who was prime minister when the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared on March 8, 2014, told Sky News in a documentary.

Flight MH370 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, triggering the biggest hunt in aviation history.

Only a few fragments of the jet have been found, all on western Indian Ocean shores, and search efforts ended in 2018.

Abbott told Sky News that someone “from the very top levels of the Malaysian government” told him “very, very early on, they (Putrajaya) thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot”.

“I’m not going to say who said what to whom but let me reiterate, I want to be absolutely crystal clear, it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot.”

Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the pilot of the Boeing 777, which carried 239 people, a majority of whom were Chinese, when it disappeared over the South China Sea about 40 minutes into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

In the months after the plane vanished, the media scrutinised everything from his political beliefs to his mental health for clues as to what could have happened.

Unconfirmed reports said he may have been distraught over marital woes or the controversial conviction of then opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on sodomy charges just hours before MH370 took off.

But, family and friends of Zaharie – a highly respected veteran pilot – have strongly rejected such claims as baseless.

In 2016, Malaysian officials revealed that he had plotted a path over the Indian Ocean on a home flight simulator but stressed that this did not prove he deliberately crashed the plane.

Abbott said he never talked about the murder-suicide theory because all avenues needed to be exhausted during search efforts.

“What I believed was happening, and what I certainly expected to happen, was that the search would cover the maximum possible range of that aircraft,” he told Sky News.

In the wake of the murder-suicide theory, Abbot is now urging Australia to launch another investigation and explore further potential crash sites. – February 19, 2020.