Residents of the remote Maldives island of Kuda Huvadhoo in Dhaalu Atoll swear they saw a "low flying jumbo jet" on the morning of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. They came forward with their story, but their claims were met with ridicule.
The top Australian team investigating the disappearance had dismissed the report stating that there was no way the jet could have been anywhere near the Maldives. The trajectory of the flight was based on the satellite images available at the time.
But the question that remains is why were the accounts of a number of eyewitnesses dismissed with almost utter disdain.
The Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared on March 8 last year when it inexplicably veered off course en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. Aviation control had lost all communications with the plane in the wee hours, Malaysia time. Once the news broke about the missing flight was published in the local edition of Haveeru, the first claims of the Kudahuvadhoo sighting was made on the comments section.
At the time, no one, especially not the residents of a remote island in Dhaalu Atoll had neither the information nor a fathomable need to cook up a story of that magnitude. The local media had looked into the claims made by the residents of the Kudahuvadhoo after comments started flooding in about the possible sighting.
But their claims recieved mainstream media attention 10 days after the flight went missing.
The possible eyewitnesses had continued to maintain their version of events despite Maldivian authorities moving quickly to dismiss the claims. Local aviation authorities were adamant that the flight had not shown up on their "surface monitor radars" and no unauthorized air-crafts had entered Maldivian airspace on the morning in question. That was in March 18, 2014.
Hishammuddin Hussein, then Malaysian acting transport minister, had told reporters in Kuala Lumpur that the authorities in the Maldives have told Malaysia the reports are "not true".
"I can confirm that the Maldivian Chief of the Defence Force has contacted his counterpart in the Maldives, who has confirmed that these reports are not true," Hishammuddin had said.
The Maldives army chief had told Haveeru that there were no evidence to corroborate the claims. But the claims of so many people will be explained, he had said. But to this day, no plausible explanation has been given as to what the residents of Kudahuvadhoo could have possibly seen.
So it is safe to assume that the reports of the sighting had not been aptly investigated before the information was conveyed to the Malaysian authorities. It could also be that Maldives has no tangible means of detecting unauthorized air-crafts entering its airspace.
Satellite and military radar data projected two huge corridors through which it might have flown. Investigators say it was deliberately diverted off course. Satellite data also suggested that the last "ping" was received by a satellite somewhere close to the Maldives and the US naval base on Diego Garcia.
In June this year, Dr Alec Duncan of the university's Marine Science and Technology team said that according to the low frequency signals picked up by underwater sound recorders, there was a "slim chance" that the plane had travelled above Maldives and had crashed into the Indian Ocean.
However, the chances of these signals having come from MH370 were as low as 10 percent.
The researchers had seemingly made the suggestion on calculations based on the signals received by their underwater sound recorders about the time the plane had gone missing.
However, a year-long hunt in the deep ocean far off Australia's west coast, where satellite data indicate the Boeing 777 crashed, had yielded nothing.
The discovery of a wing fragment on a beach in Reunion Island last week which has now been confirmed as a flaperon of the missing flight has prompted aviation experts to now incline towards the claims made by the Kudahuvadhoo residents 17 months ago.
But the way the claims were dismissed by the Maldivian authorities, had made them the laughing stock of the entire nation, and the last possible sighting of one of the biggest mysteries of aviation history has been reduced to nothing but a mere joke.
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