The pilot of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet reportedly attended the trial of a political dissident that he zealously supported, hours before jumping into the cockpit of his 777.
Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an ardent backer of the country’s opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, and had attended the man’s sex-crime trial before going to work the day Flight 370 vanished, according to The Daily Mail.
Shah was likely very upset, when a court hit Ibrahim with a five-year sentence for homosexuality — in charges that his backers insist are trumped up. A photograph emerged Sunday of Shah wearing a t-shirt “Democracy is Dead.”
Seven hours after the controversial court ruling, Shah took control of a Boeing 777-200 bound for Beijing and carrying 238 passengers and crew.
Shah, 53, had more than 18,000 hours of flying time and had built his own flight simulator at home, complete with six computer screens, pedals and a yoke.
Pals call him an “aviation geek,” and his passion for flight is common among his Malaysia Airlines colleagues.
Criminal investigators searched the homes of Shah and his co-pilot on Saturday in the desperate hunt for clues as to what, or who, was behind the plane’s disappearance.
Three cops spent two hours Saturday at Shah’s luxury home in a gated community outside Kuala Lumpur.
They found nothing incriminating, local media said. Shah’s wife and three kids fled the home to get away from media.
The same cops descended on the home of co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur, and spent about an hour inside.
A fellow pilot and friend of Shah’s dismissed any connection between the captain’s political beliefs and the plane’s disappearance.
“Is it wrong for anyone to have an opinion about politics?” the pilot friend told Reuters.
“Please, let them find the aircraft first. Zaharie is not suicidal, not a political fanatic.”
US Rep. Mike McCaul [R-Texas], chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Sunday that all the evidence “is pointing toward the pilot and copilot” of Flight 370.
“Once thing we do know is that this was not an accident,” McCaul said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“This was an intentional deliberate act to bring down this airplane … that unfortunately probably killed 239 people.”
He added: “All the evidence is pointing toward the cockpit, toward the pilot and co-pilot.”
The Beijing-bound Boeing 777-200ER took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. on March 8 with 239 people on board.
It lost contact with air-traffic control roughly an hour later.
Someone apparently disabled the plane’s communication systems and turned off the transponder, which identifies planes otherwise seen only as radar blips.
Using satellite data, investigators confirmed that the plane was flying for seven more hours after losing contact, probably over the Indian Ocean — thousands of miles off its intended course.
Meanwhile, CNN quoted former FBI assistant director James Kallstrom saying it’s possible the plane could have landed someplace where it could be “repurposed’’ for “some dastardly deed down the road.’’
Law enforcement sources told The Sunday Times of London that one passenger was thought to have flight training but would not give any details.
A Malaysian newspaper said a passenger named Mahamad Khairul Amri, 29, was an “aviation engineer.’’
Hamid, a relative newbie with less than 3,000 hours flying time, has been in investigators’ cross hairs since a report emerged that he once let two Australian women in his cockpit. He was training to fly the Boeing 777.
No evidence has emerged as to where Flight 370 could be.
George Bibel, an aviation engineering expert and author of the book “Beyond the Black Box,” is not optimistic about its fate.
“I predict they’re never going to find it,” the University of North Dakota professor told The Post.
In 2009, Air France Flight 447 took off from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, bound for Paris, but crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew. At first there were no signs of the jet, but while debris was found after a few days, it took two years to find most of the wreck.
The search area for Flight 370 is much larger, Bibel noted.
“This is going to be 1,000 times harder than the Air France search,” he said.
Satellite data has helped guide probers to two potential “corridors” of travel for the plane — northwest toward Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in Central Asia, or south over the Indian Ocean.
The lack of news or clues about the plane’s location has fueled hope among some of the passengers’ loved ones.
“My gut feeling is that it landed,” said 48-year-old Beijing school teacher Sarah Bajc, whose partner Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive, was aboard Flight 370.
Bajc told the Los Angeles Times: “I still feel his spirit. I don’t feel he is dead.”