MOSCOW, May 19 (RIA Novosti) – The US Central Intelligence Agency has information about a Malaysian plane that went missing more than two months ago, but refuses to share it, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was quoted as saying by the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday.
"The plane is somewhere, maybe without MAS [Malaysia Airlines] markings," Mohamad said, adding that the plane’s disappearance was "most likely not an ordinary crash after fuel was exhausted."
"It is a waste of time and money to look for debris or oil slick or to listen for pings from the black box," he said, according to the Australian paper.
The MH370 flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board the US-made Boeing 777, mysteriously disappeared from radar on March 8. The cause of the incident and the whereabouts of the plane remain unknown after searches of vast areas of the Indian Ocean in the past two months.
Last weekend, a US Navy deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle searched for the aircraft’s black boxes at depths of more than 4,500 kilometers (2,600 miles) in a remote region of the Indian Ocean.
The search effort intensified in early April after the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield picked up signals "consistent" with the airplane’s flight recorders. There is no confirmation yet that the signal originated from the missing Boeing’s black boxes.
Mohamad, the country's longest serving prime minister, held the office for 22 years until 2003. He is a known critic of the United States and other Western countries, and has said that the disappearance was not solely Malaysia’s fault.
"Someone is hiding something. It is not fair that MAS and Malaysia should take the blame," he wrote on his blog, adding it was unlikely the Boeing 777 went down after a soft landing, because the maker allows the aircraft to be remotely controlled by "certain" government agencies.
Planes "don’t just disappear … certainly not these days, with all the powerful communications systems, radio and satellite tracking and filmless cameras which operate almost indefinitely, and possess huge storage capacities," Mohamad wrote, claiming that control of the plane could have been seized remotely.
Earlier this month, the airline closed family assistance and accommodation centers in Beijing for relatives of the flight's 12 crew members.
