In the most comprehensive account to date of the plane's fate, Najib drew an ominous picture of what happened aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, saying investigators had determined there was "deliberate action by someone on the plane."
Najib said the investigation had "refocused" to look at the crew and passengers. A Malaysia Airlines representative, speaking to relatives of passengers in Beijing, said the Malaysian government had opened a criminal investigation into the plane's disappearance.
The plane's whereabouts remain unknown one week after it disappeared from civilian radar shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur. But Najib, citing newly analyzed satellite data, said the plane could have flown along two paths: one stretching from northern Thailand toward the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan border, the other stretching from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.
Though previously U.S. officials believed the flight could have remained in the air for several extra hours, Najib said Saturday that the flight was still communicating with satellites until 8:11 a.m. - seven and a half hours after takeoff. There was no further communication with the plane after that time, Najib said. If the plane was still in the air, it would have been nearing its fuel limit.
"Due to the type of satellite data," Najib said, "we are unable to confirm the precise location of the plane when it last made contact with the satellite."
Comment: Say what?
The new leads about the plane's path, though ambiguous, have drastically changed a search operation involving more than a dozen nations. Malaysia on Saturday said that efforts would be terminated in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, the spot where the plane first disappeared from civilian radar.
Comment: Since any serious investigation would have turned up this "new information" almost immediately, why did they spend so long searching in the wrong area? Or is this just another cover story for something more weird?
Malaysian authorities are now likely to look for help from other countries in Southeast and South Asia, seeking mysterious or unidentified readings that their radar systems might have picked up. Malaysia has confirmed that a previously unknown blip picked up by its military radar was indeed MH370. That blip suggests the plane had cut west, across the Malaysian peninsula, after severing contact with the ground.
Comment: It seems they are using the cute word "blip" to downplay the significance of this plane that was tracked on military radar, as if someone didn't know straight away exactly what it was (or was likely to be). Or maybe, again, the whole thing is a further cover story.
Malaysia received help in analyzing that radar data from the United States' National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, and the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
Malaysian investigators now believe that the Boeing-777 jet, bound for Beijing with 227 passengers, deliberately cut a series of communications systems as it headed toward for the boundary of Malaysian airspace. U.S. officials and aviation experts say the plane could have been hijacked or sabotaged by somebody with aviation knowledge.
Indian officials said Saturday morning that they were still awaiting new orders in response to the Malaysian prime minister's statement that the official search focus shift from the South China Sea to the two "corridors" west of Malaysia.
"Nothing is certain. These are all probabilities," said Captain D.K. Sharma, a spokesman for the India Navy. "Let the new orders come. Let's see how we respond."
They have now expanded their search from the area around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands - where five vessels and four planes have been deployed - to the north and west, by adding four additional aircraft to scour the massive Bay of Bengal - two P-8I anti-submarine and electronic intelligence planes and three other military aircraft, including a C-130J and two Dorniers. Search teams from the Indian military had spent much of the day Friday searching the jungles on remote islands of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, most of which are uninhabited, but so far came up empty.
Other nations along the Bay of Bengal are now the expanding search as well. Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to Bangladesh's prime minister Sheikh Hasina, said that country had deployed two aircraft and two frigates in the Bay of Bengal.
If the Malaysian Airways plane did make it as far as Kazakhstan in central Asia, it would have likely flown over northern Pakistan, Pakistani aviation officials said Saturday.
But Abid Qaimkhan, a spokesman for Pakistan's Civil Aviation Authority, said his office has not been asked to help with the investigation.
"We have not yet been asked for radar data sharing, which we will provide if asked for, and we will do whatever else we can to help the brotherly Muslim nation (of Malaysia) in this difficult time," Qaimkhan said.
However, Qaimkhan is deeply skeptical that the plane could have traveled so far off course without being spotted by radar or military aircraft.
"Given the strong radar system that we have, and also that India and other countries in the region have, it's very difficult for a plane to fly undetected for so long," he said. Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also said Saturday there has been no formal communication with Pakistan's government seeking its assistance in the matter.
Suspicions of a hijacking hinged on the erratic behavior of the plane after it stopped sending radar signals and an indisputable fact: Despite an exhaustive search of the waters that straddle Malaysia and farther into the Indian Ocean, no trace of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 has been found.
"It's looking less and less like an accident," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. "It's looking more like a criminal event."
If the flight continued after the transponder fell silent, officials and experts said, it must have been turned off in the cockpit.
"You've got an airplane that's continuing to fly; you've got systems that are becoming non-operational. It had to be a deliberate action to turn them off," said Ron Carr, who spent 39 years flying for the U.S. Air Force and American Airlines before becoming a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. "Somebody's clearly operating the aircraft. I have a hunch it was hijacked."
A second U.S. official said the jet's path was unusual after it disappeared from radar. The senior official said that the plane reached an altitude of about 45,000 feet and "jumped around a lot."
U.S. officials provided new details Friday about how they knew that the plane continued to fly well after its transponder stopped transmitting.
They said that an automatic stream of data from the plane ended at about the same time the transponder stopped. But a satellite that had been receiving the data continued to reach out to the plane on an hourly basis, and received confirmation that the plane still was flying.
"It is telling us the airplane continued to operate" for several hours, said a third U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so that he could speak candidly about a politically sensitive investigation.
Significantly, the transponder and the data flow did not stop at the same time, as they would if the plane had exploded or crashed into the ocean.
"They both did stop, and they did not stop simultaneously," the official said. "A simultaneous stopping is something that we have seen before in in-flight breakups, airplanes that have exploded or come apart in the air."
The data stream that was interrupted shortly after 1 a.m. on March 8 flows through a two-way onboard computer system known as ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.
"It is very possible for you as a pilot in the cockpit to turn off the ACARS system," the official said. "If you knew what you were doing in the cockpit, you could shut off ACARS transmission."
But the ability of the satellite to locate the plane - which he referred to as a "handshake" in which no information is exchanged - cannot be terminated from the cockpit.
"There's no push button," he said. "There's no circuit breaker that would allow you to shut off the handshake."
That satellite handshake took place on a system operated by Inmarsat, a British satellite company that provides global mobile telecommunications services.
U.S. officials declined to say how closely that handshake allowed them to track the path of the missing plane.
The search spread late this week from the relatively shallow waters around Malaysia to the much deeper Indian Ocean after Malaysia's military reported that its radar showed that the plane veered sharply off course after its transponder stopped working and its radio went silent.
The plane continued to maneuver as if under control from the cockpit and changed altitude serval times, the New York Times reported Friday.
The newspaper said that Malaysian military radar showed it climbing to 45,000 feet and then dropping to 23,000 feet as it approached the Malaysian island of Penang.
The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 now involves 13 countries and more than 100 ships and aircraft. Malaysia's acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, emphasized Friday that the search was expanding not because of any particular leads but because the initial search had turned up no evidence or debris.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time," Hishammuddin said. "But this is not a normal investigation. We are looking further and further afield."
The FBI is working with the Malaysian government and has sent more personnel to Malaysia to complement agents posted there. So far, the Malaysian government has not officially accepted any operational assistance, officials said.
Sharma, the Indian navy spokesman, said Malaysia has given India a massive search grid of about 13,500 square miles, an area about the size of Maryland.
In India, Adm. Arun Prakash, a retired naval chief of staff who was posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said that 1,000 Indian seamen, five vessels and four aircraft were involved in the search.
"We are looking for little pieces that can float, pieces of human body, life jackets, seat cushions in that vast stretch. It is very difficult," Prakash said.
"So far, the information that has been made available to us is quite vague, even though the direction in which they say it flew falls within our jurisdiction," Prakash said. "It is inadequate. We can keep searching till next year. It is like looking for a needle in the haystack."
When communications ceased, the airliner was flying at 35,000 feet on a course for Beijing.
"At 1:21 a.m. we lost the signal from the transponder off the Malaysian coast," said Mikael Robertsson of FlightRadar24, a Stockholm-based flight service that sells its tracking data to airports and airlines.
The company uses a system that captures GPS signals with land-based receivers located around the world. The signals are received once each second, but the Malaysia Airlines flight dropped its signal when the transponder went dead.
"Up until then the flight looked completely normal. There was nothing strange, nothing suspicious," Robertsson said, adding that his company normally tracks that flight until it gets north of Vietnam. "We have never lost a signal because there has been an accident or a hijacking. This is the first time we see such a thing."
Robertsson said the aircraft was not carrying a full load of fuel.
"The B777-200ER can fly up to about 16 to 18 hours," he said. "This flight was six hours, so it was probably fueled for about seven or eight hours of flying time."
That gave it the capacity to have landed or crashed anywhere between Mongolia in the north to Australia to the south, or from the west coast of India to hundreds of miles east of the Philippines.
Carr, the Florida professor, held out the slender hope that hijackers had landed the aircraft on a remote island.
"There's a lot of World War II airfields left over," he said. "They might want to hold the plane for ransom or hold the passengers for ransom, or they might want load the airplane up with high explosives and fly the airplane into a target someplace."
It's also possible that the passengers revolted against a hijacking like those aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a farm field in Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001.
If the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean or other waters which were not searched immediately after the plane disappeared, he said, it could take a longer time to locate it.
"They shouldn't be missing for a week," Carr said. "But then again, Amelia Earhart has been missing for many, many years. That ocean's big, and it can swallow things up rather quickly and rather completely and hardly leave a trace at times."
This US military base is well within the range of M370.
The plane was equipped with the means to be flown as a drone.
The US has extensive radar tracking capability in the Indian Ocean, why arent they speaking up?
This plane could be the vehicle for a false flag event in the near future.