The mystery of what happened to the doomed airline MH370 has taken another sensational twist, after a leading investigator accused the Malaysian government of deliberately ducking calls for another search to locate the wreckage of the missing plane.
British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey also claims debris recovered in Madagascar two years ago remains on the island – because Malaysia has not paid the required air cargo fees to have it repatriated.
Richard Godfrey is a founder member of the MH370 Independent Group investigating the disappearance of the flight on March 8, 2014 with 239 crew and passengers on board. The episode is almost certainly the biggest mystery in aviation history.
Two separate reports published in the last four months have identified new areas in the southern Indian Ocean as potential search areas, while US-based marine technology company Ocean Infinity has offered to deploy unmanned vessels to provide grieving relatives with the answers they have craved for a decade.
However, such searches must be greenlit by the Malaysian government, which owns Malaysia Airlines – and Mr Godfrey suggested it was not minded to do so.
He told the Sydney Morning Herald: “In my view, the Malaysian government does not want another underwater search for the main wreckage of MH370.
“In my view, the Malaysian government does not want the cause of the crash of MH370 to be known.
“It does not help to speculate what the motives of the Malaysian government might be with regard to MH370.”
Mr Godfrey co-authored a study which used pioneering Weak Signal Propagation Reporter technology to map the plane’s flight path, and in a separate email said his team had delivered documents to various Malaysian government officials – but had never received a reply.
Pieces of wreckage found by fellow investigator Blaine Gibson in 2022 remained in Madagascar because Malaysia had not arranged for them to be delivered, Mr Godfrey claimed.
In September French aeronautics expert Jean-Luc Marchand likewise called for fresh searches, telling London’s Royal Aeronautical Society in London they had identified an unexplored area of the sea floor which was a likely candidate.
Mr Marchand says while he and colleague, retired French airline and air force pilot Patrick Blelly, cannot directly accuse MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 52, he could not be excluded from responsibility for the what he called the “fully piloted, fatal one-way journey”.
The plane’s disappearance has given birth to multiple conspiracy theories over the course of the last decade, including being hijacked by Russians, that it landed at a US military base on the remote island of Diego Garcia, and even being taken by a UFO.
Interest was sparked once again by the release of MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, on Netflix on March 8 last year to coincide with the ninth anniversary.
Express.co.uk has contacted the Malaysian government to ask them about Mr Godfrey’s claims.
