The daily reported that the woman, Fatima Pardi, is married with three children, and had established a close friendship with Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah after they met as PKR volunteers during the last general election on May 5, 2013.
She told the The Australian that the pilot had grown close since that meeting but they were nothing more than friends. Fatima added that he was especially fond of her three children, one of whom has severe cerebral palsy.
Fatima related how Zaharie had come to her house regularly, buying gifts for her children, who are now aged 5, 8 and 12.
“There was nothing more than friendship and I feel compelled to finally break my silence to counter speculation that Zaharie might have hijacked the plane.
“This is not a lovey-dovey story,” she told The Australian.
“He was a friend of mine. We were friends. He told me he saw potential in me and that he would help me build a better future for myself and my children.
“Since the incident, I have refused all interviews because I have been afraid that what I say will be misinterpreted, and that it will hurt Captain Zaharie’s family’s feelings.
“Of course there was gossip, people will always talk whether you’re good or you’re bad. People think I am the ‘other woman’. But we were close because the children loved him.
“I don’t believe that he loved me. I believe that he loved my children. Whatever my children said ‘We want this, we want that’, he would buy for them.
“I said to him he should stop doing that because I don’t pamper my children. He would say, ‘She’s just a kid’. So what could I conclude? That he loves children,” she was quoted as saying by the daily.
Fatima also alluded to how Zaharie played an almost fatherly role to her children, but that at his request, they decided to take a step back from their close friendship and the relationship he had with her kids, in the weeks leading to the disappearance of the plane.
She said they had exchanged messages related to a “personal matter” just two days before the ill-fated flight on March 8, 2014.
However, Fatima, 35, did not reveal the subject of their last WhatsApp discussion before the flight, according to The Australian.
“That last conversation was just between me and him. I don’t want to talk about it,” she was quoted as saying, adding however that “Captain Zaharie had not seemed stressed”.
“I’m afraid what I say will be misunderstood. It was a personal matter, a private issue.”
The paper reported that she continues to work for PKR and was interviewed on four occasions by Malaysian investigators following the plane’s disappearance.
On March 8, 2014, MAS flight MH370 left the Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing, China, with 227 passengers and 12 flight and cabin crew.
Somewhere over the South China Sea, all communication was lost with MH370 and the plane was later found to have made a turnaround, flying back over the northern part of Peninsula Malaysia before heading south towards the Indian Ocean.
It is thought to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,000km west of Perth, in Western Australia. The search for any wreckage of the plane is ongoing, though some parts confirmed to be from the Boeing 777-200 aircraft have been found off the coast of Reunion Island, off Madagascar and in Mozambique, both on the south of the African continent.
The theory that the pilot was behind the crash surfaced recently in an article in the New York Magazine. The report alleged that information from the Malaysian investigation into MH370’s disappearance showed that Zaharie had plotted a similar, though not identical, flight path as that believed to have been taken by MH370 just a month before the incident.
However, the writer of the article, Jeff Wise, has since corrected the story on his personal blog, with a post saying it now appeared more likely the information was from “two or possible three separate flights” and not one single flight plot to the southern Indian Ocean, The Australian reported.
A nice person
Fatima believes that any man who was so motivated by a desire to do good could not possibly be responsible for the deaths of 238 other people.
“He was a nice person, a good person. We both wanted to make a change for our country. That’s why we were involved in politics,” she told The Australian.
“We talked about family, we talked about interests and that’s how he got close with me and my children. He always came to my house and brought things for the kids, such as toys, food.
“He always encouraged me to look after my children. Sometimes having a disabled child makes you so sad because you can’t do anything for your child, but he gave me advice and inner strength.
“If I ever complained that I was tired or too busy at work, he would say, ‘You should not complain because my work is harder than yours. I can’t afford to make any mistakes because one mistake could ruin everything.'”
She added that the frequency of their meetings reduced from January 2014 because of a “personal matter” that she could not elaborate on, but he had continued to see her children.