Beijing — The crash of a China Eastern Airlines plane which killed 132 people in March may have been intentional, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday citing a preliminary US assessment.
Flight data indicated that someone in the cockpit of flight MU5735 intentionally crashed the aircaft, the WSJ reported, citing people it said were familiar with US officials' preliminary assessment of the causes of the accident, which includes data extracted from the jet's damaged black box.
"The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit," an unnamed source was quoted as saying.
China's aviation authority (CAAC) did not comment on the content of the report.
But the Global Times, a news outlet often used as a Chinese state mouthpiece, cited the CAAC as saying the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) told the Chinese authority that it did not release information about the cause of the crash to "any media."
In April, Chinese authorities rejected similar media reports as "rumors" and "false information."
The circumstances of the crash were puzzling from the start.
The seven-year-old Boeing 737 suddenly plummeted from a height of more than 8,000 metres near the city of Wuzhou in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi, according to China's aviation authority.
On board were 123 passengers and 9 crew members, all Chinese nationals, making this the worst aviation accident in China for almost 12 years.
Chinese authorities so far have not flagged technical issues with the aircraft and have been focusing on the pilots' actions, the WSJ reported. Someone else could have also entered the cockpit and deliberately triggered the crash.
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