THE A$200 million (RM600 million) spent on searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was wasted because the Australian Transport Safety Bureau refused to accept the murder-suicide theory and assumed that the plane ended as a ghost flight, or a death dive, reports The Australian.

Martin Dolan, former chief commissioner of ATSB, said in Sky News’ documentary MH370: The Untold Story that new evidence suggests that captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was at the controls at the end of the flight.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 vanished on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 people – mostly from China – en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

No sign of the plane was found in a 120,000-sq km Indian Ocean search zone and the Australian-led search, the largest in aviation history, was suspended in January 2017.

The ATSB assumed the plane ended as a ghost flight, or a death dive, meaning the pilot was also dead when the aircraft ran out of fuel at 12,000m.

“I think the evidence is less clear now, given that we have managed to eliminate most of the area associated with that scenario,” Dolan said in the documentary.

“There’s nothing fundamentally different that we would do, it’s just we now have some additional information, which has been brought to bear, and still leads to the conclusion that the mostly likely location is in or around the area that we have been searching.

“That means there’s an increasing likelihood there was someone at the controls at the end of the flight.”

Yesterday, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott told the same documentary that Malaysia allegedly knew “very early on” that the MH370 tragedy was a murder-suicide plot. 

Former prime minister Najib Razak, who was in power during the tragedy, said suspicions over the disappearance weren’t made public and there was no proof that the pilot was responsible. 

“It would have been deemed unfair and legally irresponsible since the black boxes and cockpit voice recorders had not been found,” he told online portal Free Malaysia Today. 

“There was no conclusive proof whether the pilot was solely or jointly responsible.”

Najib said the scenario involving the pilot was “never ruled out” during the search for the plane.

Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the former head of Malaysia’s civil aviation regulator, criticised Abbott’s remarks and said there was not sufficient proof to support the idea.

“It is only a theory,” Azharuddin, who led the regulator when fight MH370 disappeared, told AFP.

“You do this speculation and it will hurt the next of kin. The family of the pilot will also feel very bad because you are making an accusation without any proof.”

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

A final report into the tragedy released in 2018 pointed to failings by air traffic control and said the course of the plane was changed manually. – February 20, 2020.