A call was made from the mobile phone of the co-pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane after it made an unscheduled U-turn and shortly before satellite and radar contacts were lost, a local newspaper reported Saturday.
The New Straits Times quoted unnamed sources saying the Boeing 777 was flying at an altitude low enough for a telecommunication tower in northern Penang state to pick up a phone signal.
Investigators traced the call – which reportedly ended abruptly – to the phone belonging to the 27-year-old co-pilot of flight MH370.
The paper said its sources declined to reveal who Fariq Abdul Rahman was trying to call.
“The telco tower established the call that he was trying to make. On why the call was cut off, it was likely the aircraft was fast moving away from the tower and had not come under the coverage of the next one,” the source was quoted saying.
Flight MH370 with 239 passengers and crew was bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 when ground control lost contact with it less than an hour after departure. Its last known location then was above the South China Sea.
Military radar later detected that the plane had turned back towards the Malay Peninsula and headed northward toward the Andaman Sea. Analyses of satellite data later pointed to the plane “ending” in the southern Indian Ocean…
