Malaysian officials said the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was likely hijacked by someone with flying experience, which is why police scoured the homes of pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid over the weekend.
Despite the home searches of Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid, authorities have said they do not have reason to suspect they were responsible for intentionally downing the jet, which carried 227 passengers and 12 crew members.
Someone who "had a high degree of technical knowledge and flying experience" had shut down communications with the ground, and the jetliner continued flying for six hours, Malaysia's prime minister said Saturday.
The 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah joined Malaysian Airlines in 1981 and had more than 18,000 hours of flying experience. He is said to "have been a devout supporter of Malaysia's main opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim... who was sentenced March 7 to five years in prison on a sodomy charge... His sentence was hours before the flight took off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia," The New York Daily News reported.
Shah had been a flight simulator enthusiast. The police confiscated a flight simulator from his home on Saturday.
"Two communication systems on the flight were shut down separately in the moments before the flight disappeared from radar on Saturday; a data system and two transponders which relayed information about the jet's speed, altitude and location," CBS News' Bob Orr reported.
Shah's co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, meanwhile, was a relative novice to commercial planes, having just graduated to the cockpit of a Boeing 777. He joined Malaysia Airlines in 2007 with 2,763 hours of flight experience, according to news reports.
Malaysian Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said an initial investigation indicated that Abdul Hamid, spoke the flight's last words - "All right, good night" - to ground controllers.
Investigators "have not ruled out hijacking, sabotage, pilot suicide or mass murder, and are checking the backgrounds" of everyone on-board, "as well as the ground crew, to see if links to terrorists, personal problems or psychological issues could be factors," as reported by The Associated Press.
Malaysian authorities have said that the jet was intentionally diverted from its flight path during the overnight flight on March 8, having flown off-course for several hours.
One passenger of interest is Mohammed Khairul Amri Selamat, a 29-year-old Malaysian civil aviation engineer who had been working for a private jet charter company. According to news reports, "he is likely to be of particular interest because of his aviation knowledge."
But his father Selamat Omar said: "He is a good boy ... We are keeping our hopes high. I am praying hard that the plane didn't crash and that he will be back soon."
"Some 26 countries are involved in the search, which initially focused on seas on either side of peninsular Malaysia, in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca," as reported by The AP.
