Missing MH370: ‘Radar shows no sign of plane’

MALDIVES: No trace of the missing flight MH370 has been picked up on the radar of this tropical island, its National Defence Force said.

“Based on the monitoring to date, no indication of flight MH370 has been observed on any military radars in the country,” it said in a statement on Wednesday.

The civilian radars at the Maldives airports had also “been analysed” but there was no “indication of the said flight”, the statement added.

The Maldives police and civil aviation authority confirmed that a detailed enquiry was underway and they were hopeful of giving a progress report later in the day.

“We are looking at everything from radar reports and records of the air traffic control,” Hussain Jaleel, chief executive of Maldives Civil Aviation Authority, said.

Several residents of a nearby atoll had told the national Haveeru newspaper that they had spotted a large plane flying over them on March 8, the morning MH370 went missing.

Haveeru said witnesses on Kudahuvadhoo had seen a white aircraft with red stripes flying low towards the southern tip of the Maldives on the morning the plane disappeared.

“I’ve never seen a jet flying so low over our island before. We’ve seen seaplanes, but I’m sure that this was not one of those. I could even make out the doors on the plane clearly,” the newspaper’s website quoted one witness as saying.

Haveeru journalist Farah Ahmed said several witnesses had given similar accounts.

“These people first heard a very loud noise from a plane flying unusually low and they came out to see it,” Ahmed said by phone from the Maldives capital of Male. — AFP