China says it has found no evidence that any of its citizens
on board Malaysia Airlines' missing Flight 370 were involved in hijacking or
terrorism.
Background checks on all passengers from the Chinese
mainland on the plane has found nothing to support such suspicions, Huang
Huikang, the Chinese ambassador to Malaysia, said Tuesday, according to the
state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua.
Authorities have said they are investigating all 239 people
who were on board the Boeing 777-200, which disappeared over Southeast Asia
more than 10 days ago en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
According to the airline, 153 of the 227 passengers on board
the plane came from mainland China or Hong Kong.
Malaysia says the evidence gathered so far suggests the
plane was deliberately flown off course, turning west and traveling back over
the Malay Peninsula and out into the Indian Ocean.
But they so far don't know who was at the controls or why
whoever it was took the plane far away from its original destination.
They're also not sure where it ended up, saying its last
known location detected by a satellite is somewhere along two wide arcs, one
stretching north over Asia and the other south into the Indian Ocean. The
plane's last electronic connection with the satellite was about six hours after
it last showed up on Malaysian military radar.
The total area now being searched stands at 2.24 million
square nautical miles, Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian defense and
transport minister said Tuesday.
Dampening speculation
By effectively ruling out suspicions for a large majority of
the passengers, Chinese authorities appear to have significantly shortened the
list of possible suspects.
The Chinese ambassador's statement is also likely to greatly
dampen speculation that Uyghur separatists from China's far western region of
Xinjiang might have been involved in the plane's disappearance.
One of the two long corridors where authorities say the
plane was last detected stretched over Xinjiang, and unconfirmed reports had
suggested the possibility that Uyghurs might be connected to the case.
Chinese authorities have accused separatists from Xinjiang
of carrying out a terrorist attack earlier this month in which eight attackers
armed with long knives stormed a train station in Kunming, a city in southwestern
China, killing 29 people and wounding more than 140.
China said Tuesday that it had begun to search for the plane
in the parts of its territory that fall under the northern corridor, deploying
satellite and radar resources.
Experts are analyzing both past and present data along the
arc stretching through Chinese territory, Hong Lei, a foreign ministry
spokesman, said at a news briefing Tuesday in Beijing.
Turn made by computer?
The pilot and first officer of the missing plane, both of
them Malaysian, have come under particular scrutiny in the search for clues.
Investigators say that whoever flew the plane off course for hours appeared to
know what they were doing.
But officials have so far reported no evidence to tie the
pilot and first officer to the plane's disappearance.
Supporting the case that whoever took the plane off course
had considerable aviation expertise, The New York Times reported that the
aircraft's first turn to the west was carried out through a computer system
that was most likely programmed by somebody in the cockpit.
The person who programmed the change of course would have
been somebody "knowledgeable about airplane systems," The Times
reported, citing unidentified American officials.
The information has increased investigators' focus on the
pilot and first officer, the newspaper reported. CNN wasn't immediately able to
confirm the report.
Malaysian officials weren't immediately available to comment
on the Times report or the Chinese ambassador's statement.
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