New Delhi, Feb 19 Australia's former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has claimed that Malaysian authorities believed that the MH370 flight that went missing with 239 persons on board in March 2014 was downed by its pilot in a murder-suicide plot, a media report said on Wednesday.
The Malaysia Airlines jet bound for Beijing had gone missing on March 8, 2014, after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.
Abbott was quoted as saying on a TV show set to be aired later on Wednesday that his understanding from the Malaysian government's very top level was that they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot. Abbott was Australia's prime minister at the time.
Australia played a key role in the unsuccessful search spread over 12,000 sq km in the Indian Ocean, which is the largest in aviation history.
"I'm not going to say who said to whom, but let me reiterate - I want to be absolutely crystal clear - it was understood at the highest levels that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot," Abbott said in an excerpt from a Sky News documentary released ahead of the broadcast.
In response, Najib Razak, who was the Malaysian prime minister then, confirmed that Malaysian investigators never ruled out this possibility.
Najib told online news portal Free Malaysia Today that Malaysian officials had considered such a scenario during investigation but chose not to make their views public.
The two-year international effort led by Malaysia, China and Australia for the underwater search for the missing plane in the Indian Ocean ended in January 2017.
A 2018 report by the Malaysian authorities had concluded that the investigators were unable to determine the real cause of the MH370 disappearance. The report suggested a lapse by air traffic control and said the plane's course was changed manually.
( With inputs from IANS )