BALTIMORE, Maryland March 11, 2014 (1:28 pm EST) Malaysian Air Force sources are now saying that the missing Malaysian Airlines Jet has now been tracked to the vicinity of a small island in the Straits of Malacca, hundreds of miles off of the course it was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China. The small island is known as Pulau Perak, said the an air force official, who would not allow his name to be used because he has no authority to speak to the media, Reuters, CNN and the German Aviation Site called "Aero." have said. The Malaysian Newspaper, Berita Harian, quoting Malaysian Air Force head Rodzali Daud, said military radar tracked the missing plane until 2:40 am, when it was flying at an altitude of 29,500 feet. The Aviation Herald said local police at Khota Bharu have said that citizens reported seeing a large aircraft at about this time that was considerably lower than these reports. The police report that the plane seen by these witnesss was only at 1000 meters or 3000 feet. The military radar's last reading on the jet was some 285 nautical miles from the last contact with air controllers. When the jet lost contact with air controllers at 1:20 am, local time, it was at an altitude of 35,000 feet. The Straits of Malacca is one of the busiest shipping channels in the world. Air traffic controllers at Subang, which was the last tower to have contact with the plane, said they tried repeatedly to radio the jet after it lost contact. Pulau Perak is a very small dot of an island that easily fits within one photograph and resembles a steep hill rising straight up out of the water. Khota Bharu is a regional capital city in the Northeastern part of Malaysia, and is close to the nation's border with Thailand.
Interpol says it knows who the two men are that boarded a Malaysian Airline Jumbo Jet that has been missing since Saturday and was carrying some 239 people. And, Interpol adds, evidence is pointing away from terrorism as a cause of the plane's disappearance. But USA CIA Director John Brennan says he is "not at all" prepared to echo that Interpol's sentiment.
The two men are Pouri Nourmohammadi, 18, and Delavar Syed Mohammad Reza, 29, said Ronald Noble on Tuesday at a press conference in Lyon, France. Noble is Interpol Secretary General. Noble added that an investigation into the backgrounds of the two men has not turned up any terrorist links. One of the men, Nourmohammadi, was en route to Frankfurt, Germany to meet up with his mother. It was his mother who called the Airline office in Frankfurt when he did not arrive as scheduled.
As searchers enter a fourth day looking for the jet and its crew, the most important result so far is that there is no result. Absolutely no definitive findings have been logged in by those flying over the ocean in and around the area where the flight vanished on Saturday. The Vietnamese Navy announced on at least two occassions that they had made important discoveries, only to have them ruled out upon closer inspection. On Sunday at nightfall, a Vietnamese Naval Aircraft said it found two miles-long oil slicks lying parallel to each other in the South China Sea. But tests of the oil in the slicks found that they were from a cargo ship and not a Jumbo Jet. On the following day at about the same late day time spot, the same Navy said it saw a Jet door bobbing in the water off the coast of the Southeast Asian nation. The plane couldn't actually recover the door, but it marked the coordinates and the next morning a ship was dispatched to the scene. The object recovered was not from an airplane.
Mr. Noble said the fact that the two passengers using the stolen passports are not believed to have terrorist connections has his organization starting to think that the disappearance is not connected to a hijacking or bomb. Both men had entered Malaysia using valid Iranian passports, he said.
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