US effort to find missing plane limited

Malaysian authorities have refused to accept large-scale American assistance in efforts to find a missing plane, as the United States is intensifying its search for any evidence that the plane’s disappearance was part of a terrorist plot.

American intelligence and law enforcement agencies renewed their search over the weekend for any evidence that the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was part of a plot.

US officials say they have not found any evidence yet.

Two FBI agents are now in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, where local investigators are hunting for clues that the two pilots or any of the other 237 people on board had any motives to hijack the flight, according to the New York Times.

The Malaysian plane went missing on March 8.

“We just don’t have the right to just take over the investigation,” a senior American official told the Times. “There’s not a whole lot we can do absent of a request from them for more help or a development that relates to information we may have.”

The Malaysian authorities opened a criminal inquiry on Saturday after learning that two tracking devices aboard the aircraft had been turned off several minutes apart.

The plane appeared to have flown for about seven hours after the ACARS system was disconnected.

The newspaper said several senior American officials have played down the possibility that a terrorist network was behind the plane’s disappearance. If terrorists were behind the episode, “it would be unlike anything we have seen before,” an official said.