As aircraft and ships continued
to search for debris which might be that of the missing flight MH370 on
Friday a Malaysian woman on a flight across the Indian Ocean claimed to
have seen an aircraft in the water near the Andaman Islands on the day
the jet disappeared.
The Kuala Lumpur wife was so convinced about what she
saw at 2.30pm on March 8, several hours after MH370 vanished, that she
filed an official report with police that very day – a full five days
before the search for the plane was expanded to the area around the
Andaman Islands.
News of her apparent sighting came as a blank was drawn after two days
of searching in the Indian Ocean for two objects deemed by experts as
possibly being from the missing plane.
Her account will be seen
by many as having credibility as the islands lie within the northern
corridor officials speculated that the plane might have travelled along
after radar contact was lost.
However, Mrs Dalelah said she had
received scorn about her account, including from a pilot who said the
aircraft she was on would have been too high for her to have seen
anything on the ocean below.
But mother of 10 Mrs Latife Dalelah, 53, insisted she saw a silver object in the shape of an aircraft on the water
as she was flying from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur. It was about an hour
after her aircraft had flown past the southern Indian city of Chennai.
‘Throughout
the journey I was staring out of the window of the aircraft as I
couldn’t sleep during the flight,’ she told the New Straits Times.The in-flight monitor showed that her
plane was crossing the Indian Ocean and she had seen several shipping
liners and islands – before she saw the silvery object.
‘I took a closer look and was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,’ she said.
‘I woke my friends on the flight but they laughed me off,’ she added.
The
same reaction has come from a pilot who questioned how anyone flying at
about seven miles above sea level could see anything like a boat or
ship from so high up.
But Mrs Dalelah insisted to the paper: ‘I know what I saw. I am convinced that I saw the aircraft. I will not lie. I had just returned from my pilgrimage.’
A large part of what she thought was an aircraft was submerged, she
said. When she tried to tell an air stewardess what she had seen, she
was told to get some sleep.
When her plane landed at Kuala Lumpur
at about 4pm on that Saturday she told her children what she had seen.
‘That is when they told me that MH370 had gone missing,’ she told the
paper.
‘My son-in-law, a policeman, was convinced that I had seen an aircraft and asked me to lodge a police report the same day.
‘Many
of my friends on the flight doubted me at first, but they are beginning
to believe me now that we know the plane (MH370) turned back and
entered the Indian Ocean.’
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