SEPANG, Malaysia – The Malaysian authorities now believe that a jetliner missing since Saturday radically changed course around the time that it stopped communicating with ground controllers. But there were conflicting accounts of the course change or what may have happened afterward, adding to the confusion and disarray surrounding the investigation.
As criticism of their inability to find any trace of the jet has mounted, the Malaysian authorities have repeatedly insisted that they were doing their best to solve the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
But the government and the airline have also offered imprecise, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information, with civilian officials contradicting military leaders.
On Tuesday, the fourth day after the plane disappeared while on an overnight flight to Beijing, the head of Malaysia’s air force, Gen. Rodzali Daud, was quoted in a Malaysian newspaper saying the military had received “signals” Saturday that after the aircraft stopped communicating with ground controllers, it changed course sharply.
According to this new account, the last sign of the plane was recorded at 2:40 a.m. Saturday, and the aircraft was then near Pulau Perak, an island more than 100 miles off the western shore of the Malaysian Peninsula.
Daud, however, denied Wednesday that he said the plane had been tracked by military radar to the Malacca Strait.
Daud’s assertion stunned aviation experts as well as officials in China, who had been told again and again that authorities lost contact with the plane more than an hour earlier, when it was on course over the Gulf of Thailand, east of the peninsula. But the new account seemed to fit with the decision on Monday, previously unexplained, to expand the search area to include waters west of the peninsula.
Malaysia Airlines, meanwhile, offered a third, conflicting account. In a statement, the airline said authorities were “looking at a possibility” that the plane was headed to Subang, an airport outside Kuala Lumpur that handles mainly domestic flights.
