Irregularities in MH370 audio recordings indicate possible editing, say experts

The Malaysian Insider
MAY 03, 2014

Audio forensic experts spotted several irregularities in audio recordings from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which suggested they may have been edited, a United States news network reported.

According to NBC News, the experts said at least two different audio sources recorded the tapes, wherein one of those recordings may have been a digital recorder held up to a speaker.

The Malaysian Transport Ministry on Thursday released a 5-page preliminary report on the missing plane along with the audio recording.

Analysts who listened to the recordings also told NBC that they noticed four clear breaks in the audio that indicated edits, NBC reported.

“It’s very strange,” audio-video forensic expert Ed Primeau of Primeau Forensics was quoted as saying by NBC.

“At approximately 1:14… it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it’s a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That’s a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing.”

Primeau and forensic audio examiner Kent Gibson also pointed out other details to NBC on their suspicions.

Gibson said that the tapes indicated that “Malaysian authorities or whoever presented this made edits for whatever reason”.

He added that ”it’s not the way to handle evidence,” but it also did not necessarily imply anything about the investigation.

“Unfortunately, there are no smoking guns, except there are edits. And there are clear edits,” Gibson was quoted telling NBC.

MH370 enroute to Beijing with 239 people from 15 countries on board, disappeared from radar at 1:30am on March 8.

A multinational search was launched to find the missing plane. Investigators think it is somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, off the west coast of Australia. But so far, all leads and information which have been established through reports and data have yielded nothing. – May 3, 2014.