Tony Abbott is calling for a new hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, after revealing investigators always believed it was a mass murder-suicide.

The former prime minister says Malaysian government officials told him early-on the pilot had hijacked and downed the aircraft.

But crews in the first two search operations weren’t considering that when outlining which areas to cover, information Mr Abbott says he wasn’t told at the time.

He believes it was kept secret as the Malaysian government was trying to “save face” over the disaster and tells Alan Jones, “That’s why we’ve just got to keep searching until we find them.”

“Certainly, at the top levels of the Malaysian government, that was always their working assumption.

“That this guy had decided to create the most horrible crime imaginable.”

The former PM says, “We owe it to the families of those who were lost to search every possible bit of that ocean”.

“Let’s do the search! It is just unconscionable that, in this day and age, so many people could literally have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

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