MONONGAHELA, Pa. — A company official says a woman based in western Pennsylvania was among the 239 people aboard a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared en route to Beijing over the weekend.
Eastman Chemical Co. says Mei Ling Chng of South Park was on the Boeing 777 that vanished from radar between Malaysia and Vietnam. The Malaysian woman was a senior process engineer for Eastman subsidiary Flexsys America in Monongahela, near Pittsburgh.
Eastman Chemical spokeswoman Tracy Kilgore told reporters in an email that officials “are deeply shocked and saddened.”
She said Chng had transferred to Monongahela in 2010.
Kilgore said Chng was “remembered fondly by her co-workers as being … pleasant and happy as well as well-respected.”
Flexsys makes and supplies chemicals for the rubber industry.
Meanwhile, a shadowy group called the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade has claimed responsibility for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 — but officials were skeptical and said the claim could be a hoax.
The group — unheard of before now — on Sunday sent an email to journalists across China that read: “You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as pay back,” but the message provided no details of what brought the flight down.
And Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, told reporters at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Monday he doubted the claim’s legitimacy.
“There is no sound or credible grounds to justify their claims,” he said, according to Malaysian news reports.
Other officials said the claim could be a hoax aimed at increasing ethnic tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the wake of the recent knife attack in the southwestern city of Kunming on March 1 that left 29 people dead and injured about 140 others.
The message was delivered through an anonymous, encrypted Hushmail service that is virtually impossible to trace, they said.