I don’t know about that. It has been said that with the changes in altitude (noted before in the news), there had to be some manual control for some part of the flight. To get that far out, they had to get back to cruising altitude for the most efficient flight (to fuel) before possibly running out of fuel (or some purposeful “ditching”).
There IS a lot about this flight that looks odd. I wonder if there was a fight for control of the plane. Maybe the guys from Iran with the false passports did play an active roll. Or maybe not. In any case, the “southern path” does look like someone programmed the auto pilot to maybe fly to Iran or somewhere nearby, but messed up the latitude from north to south. Yes, I know there are enough conspiracy theories out there, just thought I'd throw out one more. And it IS an explanation...