An eagle-eyed passenger on a flight across the Indian Ocean may have seen the missing Malaysian airplane sinking into the sea the day it vanished — but nobody would listen to her, she claims.
Raja Dalelah Raja Latife, 53, was flying from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia near the Andaman Islands on March 8, when she spotted what she believes was flight MH370 below, according to Malaysia’s The Star Online.
“It looked like an airplane . . . I took a closer look and was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,” she told the news site.
She added, “I had seen several shipping liners and islands from my window earlier. Then, I saw the silvery object.”
The stunned mother of 10 quickly reported the sighting to a flight attendant, who closed her window shade and told her to go sleep, she said.
A pilot later claimed she was too high up to recognize objects below with accuracy.
But Latife was so convinced, she filed a police report — five days before search parties fanned out in the exact same area, she said.
On Friday, planes and ships searched the southern Indian Ocean but found no debris from the missing Boeing 777, Australia’s acting prime minister said.
“The last report I have is that nothing of particular significance has been identified in the search today but the work will continue,” Warren Truss, who is acting prime minister while Tony Abbott is in Papua New Guinea, said on Friday.
Australian search crews were hunting for two large floating objects, detected by a satellite, off the southwest coast of the continent, sources said.
A Malaysian official on Thursday night claimed there may be a “credible lead,” explaining the objects were spotted roughly 1,000 miles off the coast of Australia and may be plane parts.
Cloudy skies and rough waters made it hard for Australian pilots to recover the debris on Friday, sources said.
The Beijing-bound plane, carrying 239 people, lost contact with ground control before vanishing on March 8, sparking a massive hunt for the jet.
Someone shut off the plane’s transponder around 1:20 a.m. The jet later turned west towards the Indian Ocean, authorities said.
Sarah Bajc, whose boyfriend, Philip Wood, was aboard the plane, is waiting anxiously to hear about the “lead,” she told CBS.
“I’m desperate to hear it is an airplane wing and there are survivors clinging to it, and one of them is Philip,” Bajc said.
“I am prepared for dead bodies — but I am not prepared for never knowing,” she said.