Police hunt for motive as search for jet goes on

(Agencies) Updated: 2014-03-17 05:13

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* Police investigating backgrounds of pilots, crew and ground staff

* Homes of the two pilots have been searched

* Some countries have not replied to passenger background requests

* Malaysia briefs envoys on investigation

* Further satellite data requested from US, China and France

KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian investigators are trawling through the backgrounds of the pilots, crew and ground staff who worked on a missing jetliner for clues as to why someone on board flew it perhaps thousands of miles off course, the country's police chief said.( China Daily reporter visited homes of pilots)

Police hunt for motive as search for jet goes on

Passengers' and their nationalities:

Chinese 154
Malaysia 38
India 5
Indonesia 7
Australia 6
France 4
USA 3
New Zealand 2
Ukraine 2
Canada 2
Russia 1
Italy 1
Netherlands 1
Austria 1

Background checks of passengers on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 have drawn a blank, but not every country whose nationals were on board has responded to requests for information, police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told a news conference on Sunday.

No trace of the Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems.

Malaysia briefed envoys from nearly two dozen nations and appealed for international help in the search for the plane along two arcs stretching from the shores of Caspian Sea to the far south of the Indian Ocean.

"The search area has been significantly expanded," said Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein. "From focusing mainly on shallow seas, we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans."

The plane's disappearance has baffled investigators and aviation experts. It vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.

Malaysian authorities believe that as the plane crossed the country's northeast coast and flew across the Gulf of Thailand, someone on board shut off its communications systems and turned sharply to the west.

Electronic signals it continued to exchange periodically with satellites suggest it could have continued flying for nearly seven hours after flying out of range of Malaysian military radar off the country's northwest coast, heading towards India.

The plane had enough fuel to fly for about seven-and-a-half to eight hours, Malaysian Airlines' Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said.

Malaysian officials briefed ambassadors from 22 countries on the progress of the investigation and appealed for international cooperation, diplomats said on Sunday.

Although countries have been coordinating individually, the broad formal request marked a new diplomatic phase in a search operation thought increasingly likely to rely on the sharing of sensitive material such as military radar data.

"The meeting was for us to know exactly what is happening and what sort of help they need. It is more for them to tell us, 'please put in all your resources'," T.S. Tirumurti, India's high commissioner to Malaysia, told Reuters.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak also telephoned his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, to ask for Indian help corroborating possible paths taken by the jet, an Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.