Britain’s The Sun and Mail Online said Malaysian authorities initially denied reports of a mobile phone being detected but a confidential police report has been leaked online saying the phone belonged to co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.
Quoting The Australian newspaper, they said a telecom tower in Bandar Baru Farlim, Penang, detected a mobile number registered to Fariq a few minutes before the plane dropped off the radar on March 8, 2014.
The Malaysia Airlines flight was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The Sun said there had been a host of theories speculating what happened to the flight.
The latest alleged evidence about the mobile phone would appear to support the idea that MH370 was crashed into the sea in a mass murder-suicide, it quoted former easyJet chief pilot Mike Keane as telling The Australian.
According to the theory, the captain may have told Fariq to go to the cabin before locking himself up in the cockpit.
“Fariq would have had his mobile after take-off, so the theory goes, and tried to make an emergency call when he realised what was happening and the plane was being depressurised,” The Sun said.
Keane was also quoted as saying: “The first officer would have been skilled in responding to depressurisation due to regular training.
“If Fariq had his mobile with him, he would have grabbed an oxygen bottle before taking his phone off flight mode or switching it on.”
However, Mail Online said University of Adelaide senior lecturer in telecommunications Matthew Sorell believed the phone had been switched on before the aircraft neared Penang and that the handset performed a “new location area update”.
“This means the phone was on and responded automatically when it detected the cell signal over Penang,” it quoted Sorell as saying.
According to The Australian, authorities in Malaysia had previously dismissed reports of the phone detection, which were first made in April 2014.
It said the confidential police report which carried details on the phone had been leaked online and backed up the view that the authorities knew the phone had been detected.
The newspaper said no mention was made of the phone in a Factual Information Safety Investigation report released by the authorities in March 2015.
It also quoted Fariq’s father, Ab Hamid Md Daud, as saying he was not aware of the detection of the phone signal as Malaysian authorities had not told him.