The simulator that Zaharie had at home, she said for starters, had not been working for at least a year before MH370. She was quoting Zaharie’s wife, Faiza Khanum, and their children.
Sakinab was speaking with CNN at her home in Kuala Lumpur after New York Magazine (NYM), citing new evidence, reported that pilot suicide caused the plane’s disappearance. She calls the “evidence” a fabrication considering that her brother was not in any form of distress before MH370. The Malaysian police cleared her brother.
The NYM report stressed on a southern Indian Ocean route recovered from deleted files by the FBI from Zaharie’s computer.
“I still think of him first thing in the morning and cry for him the last thing at night,” said Sakinab. “The latest accusation? Oh, my God. Heaven forbid!”
She assured that she knew Zaharie like the back of her hand. There was a 17-year age gap between them, she being the senior. She looked at her younger sibling as if he was her own child, her own son.
“Whatever problems he encountered, I would be the first person he would come to,” said Sakinab. “Even after he became a grandfather, I still looked at him as before.”
She can still remember the day MH370 went missing and Zaharie’s photo appeared on the TV. “I was screaming. I was all alone in the house. I was screaming, ‘no, no, Ari, Ari’. He had been flying for over 30 years, he was so senior, he knew what he was doing.”
Initially, the family avoided the press but when speculation about the pilots grew, Sakinab decided that she had to defend her brother. The family posted three brief videos about him on YouTube.
“There was so much talk, so many accusations,” she recalled. “I thought that we should tell the world what he was like.”
“We wanted to show that he was no crackpot. He was a normal family man, normal father, grandfather, pilot, and instructor.”
Sakinab dismissed claims that Faiza and Zaharie had severe marital problems and may have been in the process of going separate ways. “They were married 30 years and had three children and were still together.”
She conceded the couple had problems, “off and on”, “but not to the point that would cause him to commit this crime.”
Jailed former parliamentary Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim’s name came up during the CNN interview and was dismissed as a “momentary fancy”. “He was a supporter of Anwar’s party but this was a ‘momentary fancy’,” claimed Sakinab.
The sister doesn’t know what happened to the brother who has 18,000 flying hours behind him.
Zaharie, the second-youngest of nine children, obtained a pilot’s licence from the Philippines and joined Malaysian Airlines System (MAS) in 1981.
Sakinab and her family have said their goodbyes to Zaharie, accepting the plane has crashed. “But he’s always here. I speak about him in the present tense. It’s so surreal that he’s gone. And so hard,” she said in struggling with her emotions.
The last time that the sister saw the brother was at a family luncheon two weeks before MH370. He was his normal self, teasing his nieces, offering his opinions. “Among us he was the most opinionated person,” said Sakinab. “If you met him, you would like him. He was very boisterous, a very fun-loving guy.”