Malaysian aircraft mystery: Did Hijackers plan 9/11-type attack in India?

New Delhi: A week after the Malaysian plane MH 370 was thought to have crashed, its disappearance has turned from increasingly mysterious to a possible hijack. Malaysia turned the search into a criminal investigation on Saturday, after its Prime minister declared that the aircraft had been deliberately diverted from its planned route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane then flew as much as seven hours to an unknown destination. Meanwhile, on Saturday, Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state in the US, tweeted, "Malaysia plane mystery: Direction, fuel load & range now lead some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city." The flight 370 sent its last hourly transmission to a satellite at 8.11am on March 8 over seven hours after it took off from Kuala Lumpur. According to the Malaysian government, the map shows two possible locations of the aircraft. The Prime Minister Najib Razak said that the communications systems of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 were deliberately disabled. "Always when you fly, you are in contact with air traffic control in some country but the plane didn't contact Vietnam air traffic control. The transponder signal was turned off, so I think the timing of turning off the signal just after it left Malaysian air traffic control indicates someone did this on purpose," he asserted. Based on the angle of transmission from the plane, Najib stated that a satellite orbiting 35,800km over the middle of the Indian Ocean received a transmission that came from a location somewhere along one of two arcs. One arc runs near Jakarta, Indonesia, to the Indian Ocean while the other runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia to northern Thailand. While on Saturday, Malaysian police went to the house of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the pilot of the missing flight MH370, minutes after Razak announced that investigators would refocus on the crew and passengers of the aircraft that disappeared eight days ago. "Two police officers went to 53-year-old Capt Zaharie’s house in the suburb of Shah Alam here," officials said, without further elaborating. The Indian military also spent much of Saturday scanning the Bay of Bengal in a big hunt for the missing plane.