Flight MH370: Passengers and crew 'suffocated', say experts

The passengers and crew of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 died from suffocation while coasting into the ocean on autopilot, a new reports suggests.

The Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) wrote a 55-page report that suggested investigators had come to the conclusion after comparing the conditions of the flight with previous disasters.

It highlighted that the report contained no new evidence from inside the jet, however.

The report noted the absence of communications and the steady flight path, and a number of other abnormalities in the flight's course.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the ATSB report said: "Given these observations, the final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370's flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction."

Australian officials have also announced the search for the missing plane will move further south in the Indian Ocean than previously.

It is now more than 100 days since the plane carrying 239 passengers and crew disappeared on 8 March shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing.

Investigators believe that the little evidence they have suggests the plane was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometres from its scheduled route before plunging into the Indian Ocean.

A report in the The Sunday Times recently suggested that the pilot of the plane was the main suspect in the case.

After completing checks on all of those on board, police discovered that captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, had used a simulator to carry out drills for a flight far out into the southern Indian Ocean to land on a small island runway.

The records of the simulation were deleted, but then retrieved by security experts.

However, police said they were looking at "all possible angles", including mechanical fault or terrorism.

The Malaysian transport minister Hishamuddin Hussein subsequently rejected the claims about the pilot as "speculation", telling the Hindustan Times: "Don't listen to speculation, basically it's not fair to the pilot's family. It's about family and he has children and this time, if you're wrong, how are you going to repair the damage?"

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