The head of the investigation into the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has denied any conclusive evidence of hijacking and said it was just one of a number of lines they're looking at.
His comments came after a Malaysian government official said investigators had concluded that one of the pilots or someone else with flying experience hijacked the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
The official, who was not named but is involved in the investigation, told AP no motive has been established, and it is not yet clear where the plane was taken.
The official said that hijacking was no longer a theory. "It is conclusive."
He said evidence that led to the conclusion were signs that the plane's communications were switched off deliberately, data about the flight path and indications the plane was steered in a way to avoid detection by radar.
However, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, who is leadingthe investigation denied it.
"It is not conclusive. I'm heading the investigation and nobody is saying that. It's not true. We are looking at the possibility, we're looking at all possibilities. We're doing every profile of the passengers and crew but there is no firm evidence or leads so far," he told the Telegraph.
The Boeing 777's communication with the ground was severed under one hour into a flight March 8 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian officials have said radar data suggest it may have turned back and crossed back over the Malaysian peninsula westward, after setting out toward the Chinese capital.
Earlier, an American official told The Associated Press that investigators are examining the possibility of "human intervention" in the plane's disappearance, adding it may have been "an act of piracy."
While other theories are still being examined, the U.S. official said key evidence suggesting human intervention is that contact with the Boeing 777's transponder stopped about a dozen minutes before a messaging system on the jet quit. Such a gap would be unlikely in the case of an in-flight catastrophe.
The Malaysian official said only a skilled aviator could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea, and that it appeared to have been steered to avoid radar detection. The official said it had been established with a "more than 50 percent" degree of certainty that military radar had picked up the missing plane after it dropped off civilian radar.
A US source also said said faint electronic signals sent to satellites from a missing Malaysian plane show it may have been flown thousands of miles off course before running out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
Analysis in Malaysia and the United States of military radar tracking and pulses detected by satellites are starting to piece together an extraordinary picture of what may have happened to the plane after it lost contact with civilian air traffic.
The fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, and the 239 passengers and crew aboard, has been shrouded in mystery since it vanished off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour into a March 8 scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Investigators are focusing increasingly on foul play, as evidence suggests the plane turned sharply west after its disappearance and - with its communications systems deliberately switched off - continued to fly for perhaps several hours.
"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," said the source, a senior Malaysian police official.
A US source familiar with the investigation said there was also discussion within the US government that the plane's disappearance might have involved an act of piracy.
A source familiar with data the US government is receiving from the investigation said the pulses sent to satellites were ambiguous and had been interpreted to provide two different analyses.
The electronic signals were believed to have been transmitted for several hours after the plane flew out of radar range, said the source familiar with the data.
The most likely possibility is that, after travelling northwest, the Boeing 777-200ER made a sharp turn to the south, over the Indian Ocean where officials think, based on the available data, it flew until it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, added the source.
The other interpretation is that Flight MH370 continued to fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory.
The source added that it was believed unlikely the plane flew for any length of time over India because that country has strong air defence and radar coverage and that should have allowed authorities there to see the plane and intercept it.
The official described the signals as a "handshake" - a brief interaction between plane and satellite.
In normal circumstances, this handshake would precede the sharing of more data, but this did not happen because the plane's transponders had been apparently switched off.
No location data was transmitted, the official said, merely a calculation telling the satellite in which direction to tilt its equipment to search for the plane.
Either way, the analysis of satellite data appears to support the radar evidence outlined by sources familiar with the investigation in Malaysia.
Two sources told Reuters that military radar data showed an unidentified aircraft that investigators suspect was Flight MH370 following a commonly used commercial, navigational route towards the Middle East and Europe.
That course - headed into the Andaman Sea and towards the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean - could only have been set deliberately, either by flying the Boeing 777-200ER jet manually or by programming the auto-pilot.
The disappearance of the Boeing 777 - one of the safest commercial jets in service - is shaping into one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history.
It is extremely rare for a modern passenger aircraft to disappear once it has reached cruising altitude, as MH370 had. When that does happen, the debris from a crash is usually found close to its last known position relatively quickly.
In this case, there has been no trace of the plane, nor any sign of wreckage, as the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries scour the seas on both sides of peninsular Malaysia.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time ... as new information focuses the search, but this is not a normal investigation," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told a news conference on Friday. "In this case, the information has forced us to look further and further afield."
India has deployed ships, planes and helicopters from the remote, forested and mostly uninhabited Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. "This operation is like finding a needle in a haystack," said Harmeet Singh, spokesman for the armed forces in the islands.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-hijacked.html