MH370 was shot down claims British book

London: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was shot down during a joint Thai-US military training exercise and then subjected to an elaborate international cover-up according to a book released on the missing plane.

The book titled, Flight MH370: The Mystery, went on sale on Monday, just 71 days after the Boeing 777 vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Journalist and author Nigel Cawthorne, introduces his book by claiming that the families of MH370’s passengers will “almost certainly” never be sure what happened to their loved ones.

He then goes on to say that based on an eye-witness testimony of New Zealand oil rig worker Mike McKay, the plane was shot down shortly after it stopped communicating with air traffic controllers.

At the time there was a series of military exercises taking place in the South China Sea involving Thailand, the US and personnel from China, Japan, Indonesia amongst others. This, Cawthorne has linked to McKay’s claims of seeing a burning plane going down in the Gulf of Thailand.

“The drill was to involve mock warfare on land, in water and in the air, and would include live-fire exercises,” Cawthorne said. “Say a participant accidentally shot down Flight MH370. Such things do happen. No one wants another Lockerbie [Pan Am flight 103 by terrorists in 1988 allegedly in retaliation for a US Navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier], so those involved would have every reason to keep quiet about it.”

Cawthorne then writes that “another black box” could have been dropped off the coast of Australia to divert the efforts of search teams. “After all, no wreckage has been found in the south Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious,” he wrote.

The release of Cawthorne’s book comes even as Rupesh Paul promoted a film to be made about the missing plane, entitled The Vanishing Act, at the Cannes Film Festival.

Though associate director Sritama Dutta said the film had “no similarities” to MH370 because the “true facts keep changing every day”, a trailer posted to YouTube yesterday and promotional posters suggest it reveals “the untold story” of the Malaysia Airlines flight.