A US journalist believes the new search for the missing Malaysian Airways MH370 flight is looking in the wrong place.
The plane vanished with 239 people on board in March 2014, shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur Airport en route to Beijing.
Crash investigators have been unable to find any definitive trace of the Boeing 777, despite launching the largest search operation in aviation history.
Last week Malaysia’s government announced it had agreed in principle to restart the hunt for the plane.
Transport minister Anthony Loke said the cabinet approved £55 million deal with US-based marine exploration firm Ocean Infinity to find the aircraft.
The new search will cover a 15,000 square kilometre patch in the southern Indian Ocean, based on new data that Kuala Lumpur found to be “credible”.
However, Jeff Wise argues that investigators are wasting their time scouring the Southern Indian Ocean and need to shift the focus of their search northwards.
The US journalist has dedicated years of his life to trying to solve aviation’s biggest mystery. Wise has never bought into the official narrative behind the plane’s disappearance.
He claims the plane was hijacked by Russian agents in a sophisticated plot and potentially was forced to land at one of three airports: Kuqa Quici in China, or Kyzlorda and Almaty in Kazakhstan.
Mr Wise told The Sun: “I very early thought it went north based on almost nothing. But just my intuition has always been that.
“If the plane went south it was a suicide mission. Whoever did this their ultimate goal was to die and it also became clear, really early that this was an elaborate, sophisticated, motivated action.”
He added: “A couple of weeks after the plane disappeared, the Australian authorities revealed that the scientists at Inmarsat had done some mathematics, and determined that the plane had gone to the Southern Indian Ocean.
“They wound up publishing a whole book about their methodology. So we know quite a lot about how the Australians made their decision and it’s quite logically rigorous.
“I understand quite well why they assume that it went to the Southern seabed, and it’s not irrational. It makes a lot of sense.
“I was still troubled by this idea that somebody had done something very elaborate and sophisticated in order to die and so the question I asked myself was there any other way that this data could have been generated?
“Is there any sort of escape hatch from this otherwise inescapable conclusion that the plane went south?”
Challenged to explain why radars further north never picked up any trace of the flight, he claimed that many countries “don’t always have it (radar) turned on”.
Investigators revealed at the time of the disappearance that MH370 made a U-turn, flying across Malaysia and the Andaman Sea.
Military radars and satellite data from British company Immasat showed the plane then continued towards the Southern Indian Ocean.
Furthermore, debris from MH370 was subsequently found in the ocean.
