As aircraft and ships continued to search for debris which might be that of the missing flight MH370 on Friday a Malaysian woman on a flight across the Indian Ocean claimed to have seen an aircraft in the water near the Andaman Islands on the day the jet disappeared.
The Kuala Lumpur wife was so convinced about what she saw at 2.30pm on March 8, several hours after MH370 vanished, that she filed an official report with police that very day – a full five days before the search for the plane was expanded to the area around the Andaman Islands.
News of her apparent sighting came as a blank was drawn after two days of searching in the Indian Ocean for two objects deemed by experts as possibly being from the missing plane.
Her account will be seen by many as having credibility as the islands lie within the northern corridor officials speculated that the plane might have travelled along after radar contact was lost.
However, Mrs Dalelah said she had received scorn about her account, including from a pilot who said the aircraft she was on would have been too high for her to have seen anything on the ocean below.
But mother of 10 Mrs Latife Dalelah, 53, insisted she saw a silver object in the shape of an aircraft on the water as she was flying from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur. It was about an hour after her aircraft had flown past the southern Indian city of Chennai.
‘Throughout the journey I was staring out of the window of the aircraft as I couldn’t sleep during the flight,’ she told the New Straits Times.
The in-flight monitor showed that her plane was crossing the Indian Ocean and she had seen several shipping liners and islands – before she saw the silvery object.
‘I took a closer look and was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,’ she said.
‘I woke my friends on the flight but they laughed me off,’ she added.
The same reaction has come from a pilot who questioned how anyone flying at about seven miles above sea level could see anything like a boat or ship from so high up.
But Mrs Dalelah insisted to the paper: ‘I know what I saw. I am convinced that I saw the aircraft. I will not lie. I had just returned from my pilgrimage.’
A large part of what she thought was an aircraft was submerged, she said. When she tried to tell an air stewardess what she had seen, she was told to get some sleep.
When her plane landed at Kuala Lumpur at about 4pm on that Saturday she told her children what she had seen. ‘That is when they told me that MH370 had gone missing,’ she told the paper.
‘My son-in-law, a policeman, was convinced that I had seen an aircraft and asked me to lodge a police report the same day.
‘Many of my friends on the flight doubted me at first, but they are beginning to believe me now that we know the plane (MH370) turned back and entered the Indian Ocean
No comments:
Post a Comment