Missing MH370: "I know what I saw"

PETALING JAYA - Housewife Raja Dalelah Raja Latife still maintains that she spotted debris of the Malaysia Airlines jet in the sea on her flight home from performing the Haj a year ago.

The 54-year-old claimed last year to have witnessed a large object resembling the tail and wing of an aircraft on the waters off the Andaman Islands when she was flying back to Kuala Lumpur after a pilgrimage to Mecca on March 8, 2014.

“That was what I saw. The aircraft would have been somewhere close to either the Andaman Sea or the Bay of Bengal,” the mother-of-10 affirmed when contacted by The Star just before the first anniversary of MH370’s disappearance.

She remembered feeling a pang of fear over the episode.

“When I saw (the plane), I was afraid that the aircraft I was on would crash as well,” she recalled.

The Johorean still insisted on her stand despite it having been rubbished by experienced pilots who said it was highly improbable for anything on the earth’s surface to be visible from an altitude of 10,700m (35,000 feet).

Her statement elicited both encouraging and negative reactions from people.

“I was afraid people might say I was lying. I’m just an orang kampung. There were many thoughts going around my head, I even thought I might be sent to jail as some kampung folk told me that people had been imprisoned for saying such things,” she shared.

“Some believed me while some didn’t. As expected, there were those who joked around but I didn’t heed them. I made prayers so that Insya Allah, the Almighty will reveal the truth one day,” she said.

Raja Dalelah has since lodged two police reports regarding her sighting – once on the day of her arrival back to Malaysia when search parties were scouring the South China Sea near Vietnam for the missing plane. She made another report on March 17, after being encouraged by her family. By then, the world knew that the plane had made an air turn back and flown over the Straits of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.

On that March 8, she had left Jeddah via SV2058 at 3.30am Saudi time (8.30am Malaysian time) and six hours into the flight, saw something strange while crossing the Indian Ocean after flying past Chennai, India.

“Maybe at the time the plane was not flying very high because I saw ships on the water,” she said, adding that she also glimpsed a plane fly above her.

“I feel sorry for those on MH370,” she said.

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